Good morning all. I hope you had a wonderful three day weekend. Even though I popped on for a morning prompt yesterday I took most of the day off and felt really good about having three days off. It isn’t so much the three days off, it was more the actual two days of a weekend off and then a third day to do weekend chores that I really liked. I liked being able to put those chores on the third day and have a full weekend off. It was nice. I will probably reverse my decision around Thursday when taking this Monday off means the work week felt like it evaporated but for now, it is really nice. And so we start off the morning prompt, feeling good about life. Are you ready to see what this sentence starter brings? Me too. So let’s go.
well that didn’t match my nice mood did it. Still I rather enjoyed it.
Tuesday, May 30th: The sun was shining.
The sun was shining. He would always remember that. The sun was shining. In books and movies, this sort of pain was always accompanied by storm clouds, thunder, lightning and of course the torrential rain. But no, not for him. Fir him the day Geraldine left and broke his heart in two, the sun was shining.
In fact the day itself looked like a normal, ordinary one. It was mid-July and while the early morning was cool, by the time the early morning mists, turned to dew in the grass, the sun was up and the weatherman was predicting a scorcher. He opened his front door and could practically see the dew start to sizzle as though it was oil in a frying pan.
Geraldine’s car was gone. He saw that first, but that wasn’t unexpected. She had been gone more often than she was home lately. She was picking up extra shifts at the hospital, she told him. He nodded and accepted it. She did that every summer it seemed. She would work the extra shifts as everyone else went on holiday and bank the extra pay.
She didn’t like summer vacations. She hated anything to do with the beach or the sun. She didn’t like being hot and she didn’t like sweat. What she did like was an expensive spa resort in the mountains and after picking up extra shifts all summer, she would use the slow time between the summer vacationers and the fall and winter holidays to treat herself to a week at her favorite spa. The hospital was happy to give her the time off as she put in so many extra hours and they knew that the number of incidents they would have to deal with would increase as the holidays arrived and families gathered.
Thanksgiving was always a particularly brutal one at the hospital. Geraldine often regaled him with stories of carving knives ending up where they shouldn’t be after her Thanksgiving shifts.
So her car being gone in July wasn’t a surprise. It was only when he retreated back inside the cool of the house that he saw the note taped to the coffeepot where he was sure to see it. There he found out that as he slept, his world had irrevocably changed. Geraldine was gone. She would not be coming back.
The words in the letter left no room for debate or interpretation. She met someone else and she would not be returning. She told him that it wasn’t his fault and that he had done nothing wrong, but that it was just something that happened. Like the shining sun, he wasn’t sure that was a good thing or a bad thing. It meant that he wasn’t left wondering if there was something he could have done to prevent it, but at the same time it left him hallow and gutted.
It was like being angry at the sun shining on the day his heart was broken. There was nothing he could have done. He felt like the victim of a natural disaster. One that felt targeted.
After finding the note, he went through the house, slowly, methodically. Her things were gone. All of them. He hadn’t noticed when he came in from the late shift the night before.
Ten til Midnight 