For those just tuning in, this challenge is about taking a story idea from bare bones idea into a fully fledged story by writing consistently every week day for fifteen minutes. The sentence I end with on one day, is the sentence I start with on the following. Part one was Bob’s story and has nothing whatsoever to do with the story below. Part Two follows a character named Penelope. I have a few basic sentences to act as road marks on her journey. I am loosely calling that an outline. We will see where she ends up by the time the story is done. For now, we start Part two of the 2025 Fifteen Minute Writing Challenge.
Day 40: She parked in her allocated spot and gratefully turned off the engine.
She parked in her allocated spot and gratefully turned off the engine. She took a deep breath and for a moment could only stare at the steering wheel. Her mind awa a complete blank. It was a hard fought emptiness as she could feel all of the thoughts pushing in wanting to be thought, looked at studied and analyzed.
It was like when she helped a friend set up his books. He plopped down a large and untidy box of receipts and post it notes and then grinned sheepishly. She had to slowly go through the box, determining what was an invoice someone paid to him and what was an expense he incurred. In the end she got his books in order and had a good budgeting system set up for him to use moving forward. He had been so thrilled with her help he gave her a large supply of his bath and body products as a gift.
She was fairly certain that her love of his hair care products was what he was planning to use to lure her in to help with next quarters things.
Penelope knew that thinking of Grayson and his chaotic filing system wasn’t relevant at the moment but it helped calm her down a bit. The thoughts she pushed back were just like his mixed box of receipts. Once she was in the house she could sit down with the box of thoughts and slowly go through them.
‘And I have ice cream that will melt.’
As before the thought galvanized her into action. She took her keys out of the ignition and pressed the button to pop open the trunk even as she let herself out of the drivers side door. She closed the door, slipped her keys into her pocket so she wouldn’t accidentally drop them in the trunk, And pulled out the first of her shopping bags.
‘Gong to need multiple trips,’ she thought. Penelope loaded herself down with bags and closed the trunk on the other bags. She left the garage with her load of groceries and supplies and left them in the first floor of the house before going back for the second round. Once all of the bags were inside the house, she closed and locked the door and began ferrying all of her goods upstairs. Food went into the fridge and cabinets. Cleaning supplies went under the sink and the ice cream finally made it to the freezer.
As she placed it inside the freezer, Penelope felt something inside her crack, her mental box splitting at the seams. She walked over to the living room seating area where she had tea with Mrs. Merriweather earlier and sunk down into the comfortable chair.
She sat staring into space for a while as thoughts zoomed through her head in a chaotic mess.
The feeling of being watched, her feet refusing to go to the front cart return even though it was slightly closer. The driver finding he had no brakes.
“Even though he just got the car serviced,” Penlope said aloud. Her voice was shaky and breathless. Images from her mother’s file kept dancing in her head. She could clearly see the close up of the cut brake line.
She swallowed hard. “What are the odds that someone’s breaks would go out unexpectedly just after I read about a cut brake line?” She asked the empty room. There was no answer.
“Commonality does not equal causality,” she repeated to herself. It was an old phrase she remembered hearing when she was little. She couldn’t remember who said it. ‘A man maybe,’ she thought. Penelope shrugged. It didn’t matter much. “What matters is that the two things might not be related, they just happened at the same time.” She wasn’t certain she believed the logic of the thought.
Ten til Midnight 