“Papa Ortell is an old fat man who wants to be alone with his croissant and coffee,” he spat. “Not to be bothered by… supplicants.” It was an insult.
“Jezka’s been gone a week,” I said. “Jezka owes me money. So Jezka owes you money.”
He laughed, a short, brutal sound with no mirth. “Jezka pays to find Jezka, eh? Clever. Now go away.” He waved a hand. And his eyes glowed, ice blue.
I felt bad for the kid. But not much.
Word Count: 99
Friday Fictioneers is a weekly blog hop hosted by Rochelle. She posts a photo prompt then challenges readers to write a 100 word story inspired by the prompt. It’s a fun challenge. Give it a try! Check here for the info then write your story and post it, link up and enjoy the other stories!
I think it’s Saturday. It may not be, and if it turns out that I’m wrong and it’s not Saturday, I won’t be surprised at all, because as bad as my ability to tell what day it is has been damaged by my prolonged period of not going to work, this weird thing where now the boy is on vacation too and my wife is having random four-day weekends is just completely screwing with me.
That cup up there is my coffee cup. There are others like it, but this one is mine. The crayon is included for scale. That coffee cup is so large that it’s actually difficult to hold one-handed; it needs a second handle. It holds an enormous volume of coffee. Sugar is added to it via multiple scoops of the largest spoon we have.
I have lost track of the amount of coffee I’ve consumed this morning and I still do not feel remotely human. I think at some point in the last couple of days, maybe more than one of them, Christmas was celebrated in the homes of various relatives, but most of it is a blur. There is only The Couch for me today, or at least there will be once I decide there has been enough coffee.
So, yeah. If we were having coffee, I doubt I’d be fully cognizant that you were in the room. That kind of morning.
Eve watched the fog roll in over the lake and sighed. There was much to do before nightfall: secure the windows and doors, repour the salt at the threshold, and the garlic at the corners of the lot was probably rotten by now. She’d have to make sure they had enough candles, too; electric light drew more attention than fire. One might find a weak spot.
There was laundry, too, and the carpets needed vacuuming. At least the dishes were finished.
“Jim, can you take the trash out?” she asked, knowing the answer.
“In a minute, babe. The game’s on.”
Word Count: 99
Friday Fictioneers is a weekly blog hop hosted by Rochelle. She posts a photo prompt then challenges readers to write a 100 word story inspired by the prompt. It’s a fun challenge. Give it a try! Check here for the info then write your story and post it, link up and enjoy the other stories!
If we were having coffee, we’d be talking Star Wars. There’s little or nothing else to talk about. I’ll be seeing The Force Awakens Friday afternoon– granted, after many people have seen it already (oh, were I just younger; I spent three days waiting in line outside in costume for Phantom Menace tickets, and there were widespread roars of delight when it was reported that the then-fledgling-technology MoviePhone was crashed as hell) but I have a kid now and that means I don’t get to go to late evening shows on weeknights anymore.
But: there are six days until I get to see a new Star Wars movie, and given what Disney plans to do to the franchise this is probably the last time that that feeling will ever get to be special. I’m honestly kind of surprised that there isn’t a trailer ready for Rogue One yet. Six days is a rather convenient number, as there are also six Star Wars movies and I’ll be watching one a day until I see the new one. Hopefully sometime over winter break we’ll be taking the boy to see it; I’m still concerned that it’s going to end up being too scary for him, and that’s one of the few ways in which the film could end up genuinely disappointing me, because I’m really invested in taking my son to see his first movie soon, and that movie needs to be Star Wars.
I’m trying to decide exactly how much I need to be restricting my internet access this week. I haven’t been avoiding spoilers, particularly, but I have decided that I know enough about the movie and don’t really need to know or see any more until I see it. Wanton theorizing with friends is fine, but I don’t want to know any more and so I’ll probably need to be turning the computer off and writing some posts early toward the end of the week.
How about you? You’re going to see the movie, or you wouldn’t be having coffee with me. Any big preparations for Star Wars?
I actually wasn’t going to comment on this initially, but something just hit me: there are a ton of sales jobs available in the area, and I’ve applied for none of them despite a suspicion that I might actually be pretty good at such work. I just accidentally figured out why: after fifteen years of teaching and twelve years of NCLB, one thing I really want is a job where, as much as possible, my evaluation as an employee is based on what I do and not on what other people do. Teachers are probably the best example of that, where just about all that matters to our evaluations now is how people who are not us and who we have no real control over do on tests that we can’t see beforehand and didn’t write. But sales is not far behind– if somebody doesn’t have the money to buy something, chances are that person just isn’t gonna buy it, and talking them into buying it anyway is unethical as hell. Sales is also a little too beholden to the vagaries of the economy than I’d prefer. I hadn’t really made that connection prior to putting this video up, but that’s definitely part of my reticence here.
If we were having coffee, it’s pretty likely that my inner misanthrope (who is not always as “inner” as he should be, let’s be honest here) would be on full display. This has been a flatulent, flabby nothing of a week for me, and I’ve either been lazy as hell after an extremely busy Thanksgiving week and Black Friday weekend or showing symptoms of clinical depression or very possibly both. There’s been a panic attack or two, and oh, I managed to get turned down for like seven different jobs this week. One job turned me down twice! One of the two “nope, not you” emails specifically referenced that they were looking for candidates who more closely fit the job requirements.
The job: mortgage closing agent. The requirements: no experience, associate’s degree. I am deep into a trap here, kids; I am not (on paper) qualified to do anything other than teach, despite being a versatile motherfucker with a ton of different skills who would be perfectly cromulent at a wide variety of different jobs. So most jobs that are roughly equivalent to my current level of responsibility and pay require years of experience doing shit that I know how to do and I am capable of doing but do not have because I’ve been teaching instead. For other jobs, they look at my resume and see someone who is clearly pushing forty if not there already and highly educated to boot (I have two Master’s degrees) and refuse to even talk to me because they assume, hell, I don’t know what they assume, but I’m unclear on the reason why someone would think I couldn’t do a job that asks for no experience and an associate’s degree. The pay was even good! What the hell?
So, yeah. I’m at the point where I really need someone I know to go “hire this guy.” The problem is everyone I know in town is a teacher, and I love y’all but teaching jobs is not what I need right now. I did have one guy recommend me to his boss, and I applied for an open job, and he emailed me about salary requirements, but upon seeing what he was offering and realizing that there was absolutely no way I was going to make it through an interview where I’d need to pretend to be enthusiastic about training people to use insurance software we sort of both mutually declined to interview.
Which is probably desperately stupid on my part, because broke. But that really was a job that I would be likely to flee at the earliest opportunity.
And I haven’t figured out how I get through the part of the job-search process where they contact my current employer and he says “Oh, that guy? We forgot he existed, he hasn’t been at work since September.” And, believe me, I had a couple reminders this week about why.
Sigh.
True fact: Neither of my eyes are actually closed in this picture.
I might change the conversation to beards after a while. I’m growing my winter beard in at the moment, and it entertains me how every time I shave a beard off the next one grows in different. This one– also something that won’t help me during a job interview, I suspect– is coming in Full Hobo, and my current look is not one that’s going to make “no, he’s not diagnosable with depression at all” be a thing people say about me.
It actually looks a lot cleaner than it is in that photo. I’d get the camera closer but then WordPress would probably shut the blog down for obscenity and this is really my only lifeline at the moment. I can’t pull off that mid-twenties pretty guy 5 o’clock shadow look, so my only hope is to let it grow until it’s long enough to not look shabby, and we are in Utter Shabby at the moment.
After all that fun shit if you were still bothering to sit near me I might start discussing stories. I had this weird half-hallucinatory falling asleep process last night– not drug-induced, I promise; this was created by comfy— and I came up with like a dozen new stories to write, several of which I still remember and have dutifully dumped into my Loose Ideas folder in Wunderlist. Other than the #FridayFictioneers piece I got no fiction of any kind written last week, and I’ve legitimately got more on my plate than I can handle at the moment, so it was kind of weird that my brain spent a couple hours tossing “This! And this! And THIS!” at me. Maybe, brain, when I’m sitting in front of a computer websurfing forhours and pretending to write, you let me work on one of those several stories?
Crazy. I know.
No one’s ever having coffee with me again, are they?
Also: I love you guys, but do me a favor and refrain from trying to cheer me up/offering messages of support in comments. My brain is weird. Venting about this shit on my blog is how I deal with it, and heartfelt “It’s going to get better, we promise!” types of messages, for some reason, frequently somehow actually make the depression and anxiety worse, for reasons that are not at all clear to me. Make fun of me. Yell at me for being whiny. Believe it or not, the way my brain works, that’ll actually be BETTER.
Oh, and if you happen to be in northern Indiana and need an employee, maybe tell me that too.
“This is the place. Through there. The City of Lights has a back door.”
“It practically says TRAP on the front. It’s too easy.”
“Fine. You stay out here. Dark’s coming.”
Kchik yanked at the handle. The door screeched open, rust flaking off the hinges, breaking off dry stalks of dead grass. The dark inside was absolute.
“You don’t enter the City of Lights by sneaking through the dark, Kchik. It’s wrong.”
He never hesitated. “I won’t forget, Faa. Take care of the girls.”
Kchik entered the dark. The door fell closed. Faa waited.
It never reopened.
Word Count: 99
Friday Fictioneers is a weekly blog hop hosted by Rochelle. She posts a photo prompt then challenges readers to write a 100 word story inspired by the prompt. It’s a fun challenge. Give it a try! Check here for the info then write your story and post it, link up and enjoy the other stories!
“It’s closer,” the old man said. “Every year, an inch or two. The road splits. They fix it. But every year, it comes for us.”
“You’re looney, old man,” I said. “That’s a chunk of rock. It’s pretty, that’s all. It’s not coming.”
He smiled, his one good eye staring balefully at me. “The titans. The ancient ones of the earth, the galevhdür, they wait. And they watch. And when they come, they are inexorable. We anger the earth, child, at our peril. And it comes for us.”
I walked away to his mocking laughter.
“You’ll see, lad. You’ll see.”
Word Count: 100
Friday Fictioneers is a weekly blog hop hosted by Rochelle. She posts a photo prompt then challenges readers to write a 100 word story inspired by the prompt. It’s a fun challenge. Give it a try! Check here for the info then write your story and post it, link up and enjoy the other stories!
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