Morning all. Antibiotics are a beautiful thing. Had a bit of a dental calamity yesterday and at least the swelling has gone down, even if the antibiotics are telling me to go back to bed. I think a nap is in my future, but for now, lets start the day and see how far we get. Timers at the ready and off we go.
Not sure where this is going, but I sort of like the character. I think he could develop nicely. There are many ways to take him out of his element.
Thursday, August 22nd: His sweater had a hole in it.
His sweater had a hole in it. He stared at the hole, wondering when and where it came from. The hole was about the size of a quarte and had burned edges. The filaments of the sweater were melted as well as burned.
‘I knew it wasn’t all natural fibers,’ he mused as he studied the hole. It looked a though someone had pressed a cigar into his belly while he was wearing the sweater. For a moment he wondered who he knew that actually smoked cigars. They had been a favorite of his grandfathers but he died more than twenty years prior and even though he could almost smell them if he closed his eyes and thought hard enough, he hadn’t seen one lit since his death.
‘Probably not a cigar then,’ he thought. The problem was, as he saw it, that he would have had to get close to whatever was hot enough to burn the sweater. The hole was on his belly and while the sweater was once large enough to drape loosely over his form, his form had grown substantially in the last few years and the material was now stretched rather snuggly over his slightly rotund belly.
‘I would have felt it,’ he thought as the back of his mind turned his study of his abdomen into an opportunity to roll potential fitness options through his mind. In the back of his head a much more fit version of himself did jumping jacks and sit ups while the rest of him tried to decide when he had last been close to something hot.
He came up with nothing.
‘I wonder when the last time I wore the sweater was,’ he thought, switching gears. The mental fitness regime stilled as he mentally rummaged through the chest of drawers. Each spring when the weather was finally warm, he washed, dried and put away his heavier things. As this was one of his heavier sweaters, he was just now taking it back out of the drawer.
‘But last year we had a reasonably warm winter,’ he recalled. During that time he had only delved into the top layer of his winter clothes, the heavier bottom layers staying in place. It was only this year when the weather turned and seemed intent on making up for the mild winter of the previous year that he had to delve deep enough to excavate this garment. ‘But did I take it out the year before?’
He couldn’t recall. Ultimately he decided it didn’t matter. When it was burned was less important than that it was burned. He couldn’t wear it. Looking at the mirror he saw what he knew to be a round hole distorted into an oval. He remembered this sweater being a lot looser on him the last time he did wear it. The sleeves were too tight and his arms felt constricted. He struggled out of the sweater, feeling slightly sweaty and out of breath by the time it was tossed to the floor.
‘Probably shouldn’t wear it anyway.’ It was a familiar thought and he had it with many of the garments he took out and tried on, even if they hadn’t sported burn marks of any sort. There was no denying it. His heavy winter clothes were too tight. He knew he could layer the lighter garments, at least for a while. He stared at the pile and then shifted his sight to the chest of drawers. The way he saw it, he had too options. He could go shopping and replace the winter gear, or he could give into his doctor’s advice and the mental fitness images dancing through his brain and reshape himself so they went back to fitting. He weighed the options.
Ten til Midnight 