Morning all. I hoe everyone’s week is going well. Mine is pretty good but slipping away fast. Long to do list, not that many days. So let’s not delay and jump into the morning prompts. Fifteen minutes on those timers and off we go.
I think my brain started with one idea and ended with another. I’m not mad about it though. I kind of like the start of a mystery and think the character could be a good base.
Thursday, November 14th: The cool rain provided temporary relief from the heat.
The cool rain provided temporary relief from the heat. He knew it was only temporary. For now the rain shushed down, a veil of white noise. The ground turned the first few drops into instant mist. In fact for a while he didn’t think the rain actually reached the ground, vaporizing a foot above the land.
That didn’t last. As hot as it had been, the rain soon defeated the reflective hear and touched down. There were places where the ground was baked too hard to accept the moisture and small rivulets ran off, the street soon becoming flooded along the sides. Where grass, trees and other plants dotted the ground, the moisture was accepted, retained.
The air was only a few degrees cooler due to the rain. It wasn’t over all, a huge difference. However with so long with no reprieve, he found his flesh starting to pimple up into goose flesh and he even shivered. The change was soon adapted and his shin ceased reacting. He knew that once the rain stopped falling and the clouds passed, the sun would cause most of the moisture to rise back up into the air, turning the heat into a suffocating wet blanket far thicker than air should actually be. He knew the plants would struggle to lock down and retain every drop they could. Seeing the already flooded street, the water a muddy brown from the loose soil, he wished the plants luck.
Today he had the day off. There was no where he needed to be and he intended to stay where no one would come looking. He picked up his groceries for the following week as soon as he left work and had no reason to leave again until he headed back to the office.
While Tom didn’t think he was indispensable, he had come to realize that many around him seemed to favor just asking him for details rather than going to find the information for themselves. They assumed he would know and made him their first stop. It made each day a slew of random questions popping up and disrupting him from what he was doing.
The problem was that he usually did know the answer. And when distracted by something else he often answered without thinking. If he could convince his mouth to refrain from responding then perhaps they would go elsewhere. However with his attention elsewhere he had not been able to do so. Tom had no illusions about being the smartest or most clever. What he did have was a photographic memory.
If he had seen, read or even heard the information somewhere else then it was there, filed in perpetuity. While the others teased him about his mental encyclopedia he wished they would look up the information themselves. He shook the thought away and took a sip of his coffee, enjoying the quiet solitude. Today he did not need to consider the questions. He turned his phone off and wasn’t leaving the house. While he knew his address was on file at the office he didn’t share it with anyone. He liked his coworkers and often went out with them for drinks after hours. But he never brought them home and never consumed enough that they needed to take him home.
In fact, the last few times they had been out, he had stuck to the non-alcoholic drinks. While he enjoyed a good beer as much as the next person, he started noticing something off at the bar they frequented. It was frequented by a large number of people from their company and from the companies in other office buildings surrounding the bar/restaurant. The problem was he wasn’t entirely sure what was off. He just knew something was. He claimed the status of designated driver and tried to figure out what it was that was bothering him.
Ten til Midnight 