Morning all. Friday has arrived. This morning my neighbor went chasing after his basset hound Darnell who got loose. Darnell doesn’t so much as run as he flaps his way to freedom. Or our yard, often in pursuit of the feral neighborhood cats. But he was collected and the coffee is now on. So while it brews, let’s jump into the writing prompt. Timers set and off we go.
Oh I am so going to work on this over the weekend. Not entirely sure if it is mystery or horror but it looks like fun.
Friday, October 18th: She stared at the collection of bottles.
She stared at the collection of bottles. A part of her wanted to cunt them. Another part of her wanted to avoid doing so. The collection was astounding. The perfume bottles had been collected over the course of at least one lifetime, possibly more. Gina vaguely recalled the collection being started by one generation and then continued by another.
‘Maybe a third as well,’ Gina thought. She would have to check the paperwork. On its own it would have been interesting, however right now there was too much interesting. It was frustrating. Each individual thing would itself be interesting but with the more than two hundred interesting things all clamoring for attention, it all became a blur.
Gina took a deep breath. He was certain most of the perfume bottles were empty. Or at the very least had only the dregs of a scent left in them. But they each emitted a light scent. The ghost of perfumes past. Each little scent drift merged with their meeting formed a scent cloud that was already giving her a headache while standing in the doorway to the storage unit.
‘Gonna need a mask for this,’ she thought. Her eyes were already watering. ‘And the goggles.’
She stepped back and pulled on a safety mask and added the safety goggles. For good measure , she added gloves so that if anything was on the bottles, they would remain on the bottles and not absorbed by her. She had already tried to forgo the gloves in other units and found that it was not a good idea. She always ended up retreating to wash her hands and put the gloves on.
She sighed behind the mask and reached the for first section of bottles. Slowly she transferred them from the unit, to the boxes that would be taken on the industrial dolly to the area they set up for cleaning and sorting.
When Gina was told by the lawyers that tracked her down that she inherited her great uncle’s estate, somehow this hadn’t been what she pictured. The property was large, but located in the middle off it, well away from the sight of the house was this storage facility. He great uncle as well ass several people before him, rented out units. The storage facility was closed at some point. Newer facilities were built with better security and more modern facilities.
Many people transferred their accounts to those facilities. There were notices sent out telling everyone the site was closing and giving them a deadline with which to remove their belongings. That deadline expired about fifty years prior. The lawyer told her that her Great Uncle kept meaning to get out to the facility to clean it up so the old site could be bulldozed and the land reused or sold off but he had never gotten around to it.
Everything in the storage site was now legally hers. While she could profit on anything she found, she was also going to have to deal with any problems that arose.
Ten til Midnight 