Morning all. I hope everyone had a fantastic Thanksgiving, if you were celebrating. We have whittled down the left overs and with lunch time sandwiches today, the extra should be cleared. Woot. For now, before the turkey sandwiches bring on the afternoon stupor, lets jump into the morning prompt. Timers at the ready and off we go.
I like this. The character is someone that could be fun to work with, I just can’t see the exact story yet.
Monday, December 2nd: He had a horrible feeling in his guts.
He had a horrible feeling in his guts. It had been there all day. It sat in his belly as though he had swallowed a chicken bone. He could feel it like an almost physical thing.
This had happened before, this peculiar feeling. And each time a disaster struck. He felt it in the days before the house fire when he was six. He felt it again a few years later just before the accident. The last time he felt it was in college. Three days later five of his friends were dead.
He hadn’t felt it since and he hoped it was gone. He knew from mentioning it to the therapist he was sent to as a child that everyone believed it was all in his head. Dr. Grayson believed that he had something like a tummy ache around the time of the first accident and now believed himself to have this awful feeling before all major events and was exaggerating it in his own mind. Grayson believed he only felt as though he had this weight after the event, somehow retroactively adding it. Even as a child he knew Grayson was wrong.
Dr. Thomas wasn’t much better. He claimed that James had some sort of intestinal issues and that whenever he felt it flare up he automatically locked in on any event that happened near that time and claimed that there was a connection when there wasn’t one.
While Dr. Thomas made a little more sense to him than Dr. Grayson, James could never quite believe him either. He pretended to of course. He learned that was the easiest way to deal with the therapists. By the time of the incident in college, he learned never to mention the feeling. He was certain the two doctors would have both been pleased that they managed to fix him.
Hoping the feeling wouldn’t come almost made him feel as though it had been fixed. But now here it was again. James took a deep breath and settled himself at his kitchen table. He held his coffee mug, more for the warm comfort of the ceramic in his hand than for the need of caffeine. The scent snaked upwards and he drew in a deep breath. While he knew the scent of coffee didn’t forestall disaster, there was a sense of comfort to it nonetheless. After all, bad things didn’t happen with the first cup of coffee. It was only when you left the house and started the day that the world intruded.
Calm, but still feeling the weight of the feeling, James thought things through. The feeling started yesterday and grew over night. Today it was as though the chicken bone stuck in his guts was bronzed, metal adding mass to bone. In general he knew the timeline. Forty eight hours. That is how long he had from the arrival of the feeling until the disaster. He was more than halfway to the event and he could not think of what it might entail. He made a list of all the places he had scheduled to go, the people he was supposed to meet. He could see nothing that would spell disaster.
Ten til Midnight 