Morning all, I know, running late today. But on the bright side, time change on Sunday Mwahahahaha. So light when I wake as it should be. Although I still have my petition going stating that non-morning people shouldn’t be required to be anywhere before 9:30. Still, I am awake so lets get going on the morning prompt. Timers at the ready and off we go…
There is something I like about this. I think it is the mix of precision with impatience and planning with just winging it. It leaves much room for story based chaos.
Friday, November 3rd: The last step was missing.
The last step was missing. Ivan turned the page over. There was nothing there. The page was blank. He looked back to the front of the page. He read over the directions. The heading claimed there were eighteen steps. The steps below were listed out as bullet points but they weren’t numbered. The author had merely put a tic mark at the start of each step.
Ivan ran his finger down the hand written page. He counted the tic marks. “Seventeen,” he said.
He looked at the page and then he looked at the various mixes and blends he had on his table. Each of them was mixed according to each step. Sometimes the step involved the creation of a blend, other times it was how and when to combine each of the separate components. At no stae in his mixing had there been a point where one thing was just poured into another.
Now at the end, when he had six separate bowls, he doubted the last step was to just pour everything into one great big bowl. Every combination required precise measurements, sometimes only small quantities of any set mixture being added to the full mix. He figured out early in this project that sometimes to get the blend right, more of a blend then was needed was created. As the different mixes were shelf stable, having extra wasn’t a problem. It was a matter of ratios.
‘And each combination required a separate element to get the different blends to combine.’
A part of him wanted to believe that since the last step was left off, he could just mix all the remaining blends together. He thought about it. He came so far that it would be nice to just have it done. To complete the project. Then he thought about how long it took to gather each ingredient. To mix and then wait. To blend and then sift. It was a lot. Time, money, effort.
‘Smarter to wait,’ he thought to himself. He looked at the page. ‘It would have been smarter to make sure it was all there before I started.’ He thought. He shrugged. That sort of thing had never bothered him. He tended to rush in and bulldoze his way through things. This was as precise as he had ever been.
“And I can always get more,” he decided.
Ivan reached for the first bowl and carefully emptied it into a larger bowl. He then added each of the other bowls to the larger one in turn. The only reason he had for choosing the order was an old memory of his grandmother’s baking. She always added wet ingredients to dry ones to keep the dry from puffing up in a cloud.
‘I think.’ His grandmother had been gone a long time now and the memory was old and faded. It seemed like a good idea so he used it. In the end, all the ingredients were in one bowl and he gave them a good stir to combine. He waited. Nothing happened. The ingredients in the bowl remained inert, inactive.
He sighed and picked up the page. He looked everything over again. ‘Something should have happened,’ he told himself. The bowl of ingredients remained just a bowl of ingredients.
Ten til Midnight 