Happy Monday morning everyone. The rain clouds that clouded the entire weekend seem to actually be breaking up. At least the sun is trying to break through and no rain is falling. With hopes that means at least a little sun will shine today. The rain and heavy cloud cover made me feel a bit like a slug this weekend. It is time to shake some of that lethargy off though and become less slug like. And so the morning prompt. Are you ready? Then let’s go.
Interesting. I’ll need to sit down and figure out exactly what the office situation is, but I think soon documents will go missing and a mystery will begin. I just need to think about it a bit more. After coffee of course…
Monday, January 9th: Do you remember anything?
“Do you remember anything,” The question was asked calmly, matter-of-factly. I looked up at the man asking it. It was detective, lieutenant, or something of the sort. He was with the police. That much I recalled, even if his name and rank escaped me. It seemed many things were escaping me at the moment.
As I shifted to look at the man with the note pad, so patiently waiting for me to provide details, rainbow shimmers danced along my vision. My focus was blurred for a moment before I could see him clearly again. To reassure myself I focused on the details. There was a spot of something on his tie, several actually. Small white flecks. They were on his tie and a couple on his shirt.
‘Toothpaste spatter,’ I thought. The policeman brushed his teeth after putting on his necktie.
It was irrelevant at the moment but being able to focus on something helped.
“No,” I admitted. “I walked in and the room was dark. I reached for the light switch…”
My eyes narrowed as if I could see the memory more clearly if I squinted. I could see the darkened outlines of the desks in the space. The windows were on the west side of the building so even though the sun was up, little light made it into the space. It was only in the late afternoon that natural sunlight flooded the space. Then it was so bright and came in at such an angle that we often had to lower the shades to see the computer screens clearly.
In the memory I could see there were only the shadows. “It was morning,” I said slowly. “I came in early because I wanted to finish up the document I was working on.” I thought about write up. I still had time before the deadline but a thought occurred to me, a research point I didn’t think had been adequately covered. I realized it sometime around three am that morning, the thought hitting me when I got up to use the restroom in the middle of the night. I had been watching a movie shot in the desert before bed and even though I knew a late night beverage would wake me up in the night to relieve my bladder I had been unable to resist the glass of lemonade.
I doubted the police wanted to know about my lemonade or my need to use the restroom at three am if I drank anything after 10 pm.
“I was thinking of my research,” I told him instead. “I need to check to see if it was covered.”
My hand lifted as though I was reaching for the switch and I winced. I lifted a hand to the back of my head. The thick padding from the medics was still there.
“I felt a pain and saw lights before I touched the switch and then nothing until Andy arrived.”
I felt a flush creep to my cheeks as I thought about my coworker finding me sprawled out on the floor of our office. It felt oddly intimate, like I was admitting to a tryst of some sort. I thought about Andy, twenty years my junior and into dating men. There was no tryst and no intimacy between us. To be honest I couldn’t remember talking to him before this morning. I knew I probably had, but he was one of the newcomers that the recent change in management brought in. They were placed on the other side of the room and encouraged by our supervisor not to spend much time with us. We were being phased out. I touched a hand to the bandage. I somehow suspected this wasn’t part of the phasing out process.
Ten til Midnight 