Morning all. I am on the downslope of finishing a manuscript and am so close to the end that I can taste it. That makes it so difficult to concentrate on anything else. I realized this morning that I missed the Grimm Expansion post. It actually hit me at 3am this morning. Wide awake, Bing – guess what you forgot. I will catch up soon I just need to reach the end of my manuscript first. For now let’s get the morning prompt in and start the day.
I like this. It lends itself to an interesting side of a tale, I’ll have to think about it. Maybe make him slightly more devious? Who knows. It will be fun later though, of that I am sure.
Wednesday, March 1st: He was never caught.
He was never caught. That was the thing he had a hard time getting over. Alan leaned back against the wall. The sunbaked stucco radiated a pleasant heat through his shirt. It was early yet but the wall still retained some heat from the previous day. It took forever to heat up, but forever to cool down. Now in the cool early morning light, he felt the warmth seeping through his skin and into his bones as a comfort.
He woke early today. He hadn’t woken this early since the first few months on the island. Then he was still jumpy, still looking about for those that might come after him. There were many who wished him dead then.
This morning he wasn’t jumpy. It wasn’t fear that caused him to rise before the sun, fix his normal morning cup and sit on his front porch watching the sun slowly rise above the ocean. No, this morning he woke with a sense of calm release.
Alan glanced over to the stack of papers. There was a man on a bicycle who brought one each morning to him. Throughout the week he would receive the papers, read them and stack them up. On Sunday, when the man with the bicycle brought the fat Sunday paper, he would take away the stack from the previous week. Saturday’s newspaper was on the top of the stack. Later, the man with the bicycle would drop off the fresh paper and leave with the stack.
It was yesterday’s paper that cause this morning’s sense of contentment. The article wasn’t on the front page. It wasn’t even on the third page. It was buried somewhere in a column labeled notable news/international. It was a paragraph that was, all told no more than three sentences.
Jonathan K. Rothson was killed last night in an automobile accident. Rothson was the former chairman of Danvers’ Consolidated. He is predeceased by his wife.
It was a simple epitaph. But to Alan it was a sense of relief. Years ago, he worked for Danvers Consolidated. And then he didn’t. He was asked by the board, Mr. Rothson in particular to do something highly unethical. He refused and instead threatened to take the evidence of their plans to the authorities. He was paid handsomely to simply go away. His plan hadn’t been blackmail, but self-preservation. He didn’t want to be stripped of his position and blacklisted from employment.
They paid him enough to keep quiet that he could simply walk away clean and start a new life. Realizing they might still worry about him talking, Alan did just that. He took on a new life, in a new place and severed what few ties he had to his life. He even left his name behind, taking a new one. No one here even knew he was once called Alan, even if he still thought of himself that way.
Still, there lived inside him the fear that one day, they might come after him again. Rothson was the last however. With him dead, there was no one who even remembered him.
Ten til Midnight 