Morning all. Feeling a bit sniffly today. Pounding back the Vitamin C and hoping it is just a slightly rough morning. For now, let’s jump into the prompt and see where it takes us.
Okay I like this. Need to sit and do some thinking about the details, but I like the character. Oh and in case you are thinking to yourself that I use certain names a lot, in the morning names aren’t the easiest for me and I don’t want to stop to give it too much thought so I generally glance to the book case I can see from my desk and pick the names that stick out. George is written in White letters on a dark blue background (in case you were wondering James is in black letters on a pale blue background, which is why that gets used a lot too).
Tuesday, December 10th: The frogs croaked through the night.
The frogs croaked through the night. George wrapped his pillow around his head in a futile attempt to block them out. How could something so small make so much noise?
‘Surely they can’t make this sort of noise all night?’
He wrapped his arms around the pillow to keep it in place and shifted into a position were he could still breathe but hopefully once he did fall asleep the weight of his arms would keep the pillow in place. Everyone talked about the quiet of the countryside.
He snorted to himself as he closed his eyes. At first when the truck rumbled away it had seemed quiet. No traffic, no alarms, no sirens. He didn’t realize that the sound of the truck’s motor had just shocked the world into silence. Once everything seemed certain the truck was gone, the noise began. There were whirring sounds, shuffling sounds and more birds than he knew existed seemed intent on calling to each other.
George wasn’t certain what they were saying to each other but there was an urgency to the sounds that set him on edge and made him look about for a predator. He had always had good hearing, everyone said so. He was beginning to realize it was better than he thought. Many of the sounds he heard when he arrived would have been masked by the larger and heavier sounds of the city had they even been present. Here without the city to stop them they were a cacophony of discordant sounds. They were made worse by the fact that they were unknown sounds.
He didn’t know what they heralded. Did the birds cry about something dangerous he should watch out for or were they irrelevant to him. Was the whisper of tiny wings through the grass mean he was about to be attacked by some disease carrying bug or was something innocent just meandering on an afternoon stroll. He didn’t know.
Worse still was that no one else seemed to hear the sounds. Several in fact remarked nervously about how quiet it was. He had never been out of the city and would not have chosen to leave now if he had been given a choice. He wasn’t.
‘At least I get my own cabin,’ he thought. It was a novel thought. He had always shared a room with his three brothers. Now he had an entire cabin to himself. He hadn’t anticipated what a torment hearing those strange sounds would be when no one else was around. He foolishly thought that when the sun went down everything would go to sleep and quiet would reign.
‘At least I know what the frogs are,’ he thought.
With the pillow over his head there was at least a measure of quiet. He heard his own heart and the shoosh of the blood as it moved through his body. But these were comforting sounds. These sounds he knew.
‘Maybe they will become familiar,’ he thought hopefully as the relative quite helped to lull him to sleep. ‘No different than Danny’s snoring.’
The pillow slipped off his ears sometime in the night. The frogs at some point died down enough so he was not awoken, but now he heard other things. The rustlings were back, muffled a little due to the walls. They weren’t thick walls, just wooden planks with no real insulation. The cabin was roughly built and made for summer occupation.
The sun was barely up and it took him a moment to realize what woke him. ‘Voices,’ he thought. ‘But whose?’
Ten til Midnight 