Morning all. I hope you had a fantastic weekend. Mine was nice and quiet but productive. I did some cleaning and feel better for it. Not thrilling, but getting it done made me feel better. So did the rest. So now it is on with the week, rested and with sparkling clean bathrooms I am ready to face the week. Let’s start with today’s prompt and see where it gets us. Timers at the ready and off we go.
That is not really where I intended to go but this could be a nice mystery/revenge story. It is something I will have to think about. But it could be fun to write.
Monday, August 7th: He fell out of the window.
He fell out of the window. It was completely unexpected. One minute he was sitting there on the sill looking out, contemplating the sunset and then next minute he was falling. In between of course, he distinctly felt hand shoving him from behind. It was what he thought about on the way down.
Those hands.
Pushing him.
He didn’t think about death or pain or even the ground rushing towards him at speed. No. He thought about those hands. And then he thought about nothing.
The world went dark and silent. He felt nothing, heard nothing saw nothing. Then the world went white and he heard white noise, and beeping. He was cushioned by a lot of pain killers at that point so he couldn’t say he felt any pain, but he knew it was there. It was an awareness of pain kept at bay by strong pharmaceuticals. It was the same way he knew a tiger was there pacing behind the bars when he went to the zoo as a child. Even when he looked away a part of him was aware of the large predator behind the bars, separated from him only by the restrictions of the enclosure.
He couldn’t forget it was there even when not looking. It was the same now with pain. He knew it was there even though they were separated by a buffer. The pain was just waiting for the defensive perimeter to fail before it gobbled him whole.
He drifted in and out of consciousness. He was fairly certain that it was best to leave the drugs to fight the pain and hope that the pain gave up and went in search of a less defended target. In the moments he was conscious, he had the feeling of being cheated. He was certain that somewhere in the darkness he died, or came very close to it. There was no bright light leading him on, no sense of welcoming by friends or family gone before. There was no sense of peace.
There was only the shock of feeling someone’s hands on him, pushing him, the darkness and the light of the hospital. Sometimes he wondered if his shock over being pushed was what kept him from experiencing the few seconds he might have died. When the doctors later told him that he only came close to, but never actually died he felt better. He would have hated to have missed his turn at a glimpse of what lay beyond simply because he was too shocked to notice.
Once he understood he had not been cheated of such visions, he began to wonder who pushed him. He had enemies, sure. He knew that. It wasn’t personal. His family collected enemies like some people collected porcelain figurines. It didn’t matter that he left the family and was no longer on speaking terms with most of them. In fact, even the ones he was willing to speak to he hadn’t seen in over a decade. They were still part of the whole and he knew to see them, to speak to them would risk being pulled back in.
But he still looked like the rest of the family. He was cut from the same cloth. Except now, he wasn’t. The fall had seen to that. Too many bones broken, too much surgery. He no longer looked exactly like himself anymore. He didn’t look …bad, in fact once he grew used to seeing the change, he found he liked it. But he no longer looked like his family.
Ten til Midnight 