Day 111 Ruminating And Writing

Fastidious

He tugged his sleeve straight as he watched his new boss walk past the row of her new employees. The office staff had come early and impeccable to work to impress their new boss. He had worn his old suit. It worked for him. It should work for her. The new boss was a tall, nymph-like creature. He wasn’t sure what she was, but she wasn’t made for the archives, as he and his kind were made for. She was the front-office sort of creature that dazzled everyone with a single smile. The goblin in him wanted to snarl at her. He held his pose and kept his teeth to himself.

The rest of the day was chaos. She had no fundamental understanding of how cataloging systems worked. She thought you could stick all the papers from the upper offices into the same box and be done with them. How long and fastidiously he explained the rudiments of filling to her that if you stacked the magic in one place, it would tear a hole in the space-time-continuum, and there would be a hell to pay, she didn’t understand. She kept giving her insane orders, forcing the tick in the upper left corner of his eye to do a Lambada.

The woman was clearly a moron and was demoted or promoted into the archives so that she would be out of someone’s way. The whole archive staff caught on to it, and they went on with their duties as they had always done, ignoring her commands and tantrums.

He just wanted to hide in his own cubicle and not hear a single word she said, or else he couldn’t be blamed for his deeds.

Never Happened

She took a step forward, and the stones underneath her feet shifted. She looked at the space, frowning. The thing was that she didn’t remember where she was going and what she was doing. She was sure her feet had sensed a stone underneath her feet, but now there was a meadow there, and everything looked wrong. Her head felt disoriented as if there was a major shift in the universe and something was fundamentally wrong.

She looked down at her clothes. They were coarse and thick and covered in soil. She should already be in the fields working, but… but… she was sure she had been on her way to the office. But there were no offices here, and she didn’t work in the postal system. There it was again, at the tip of her memories, that future had more than the farm work and cows and wheat. That she had been working as an HR manager.

HR manager? She frowned. That sounded like nothing she understood. She turned around and headed down the road full of horse-drawn carriages and the occasional electric car.

…

The assignment was to remove a historical event, and I got rid of petrol engines. I thought that would shape the entire world directly, and I think our modern societies are based on gasoline. I asked my husband what he thought about petrol engines being removed. He said that there would be a greater need for manual labor on farms. Electric tractors lack the capacity to meet the demands of modern societies.

Kindred Spirit

Suddenly, she was there. She was the most intuitive person he had ever met. Everything felt so easy with her. She got him, and he got her. They had been sailing all over the world for a few months already, and it was like having a better version of himself with him, taking him out of his box and making him feel the world more alive.

But there was an annoying thought that seemed to follow him around. Every place they left behind fell into a catastrophe. There was always a different one. Tsunami, earthquake, disease, wars, polluted wells. He tried to ignore what his mind was telling him. It was impossible for her to do those things. They spent every waking hour with each other. And no human could make tsunamis or earthquakes. Yet, the pattern was there.

She tied her hands around him. “Are you ready?” she asked, leaning over to see what he was watching. The view from their hotel room opened onto a village square. People were selling and buying their fresh tomatoes and oranges in the square. All these people would die once they left.

He couldn’t take it any longer.

“What are you?” he gushed out, struggling free of her embrace.

She stepped back, looking at him sideways. “Darling, it’s me. What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play games with me! I have seen enough in the world to believe past my senses and reason to know that the world has more to offer. So what are you? And why? Why will you have to take the lives of all these people? Why?”

She drew a deep breath in and then let it slowly out. “Oh, darling, I should have chosen someone less clever, but you were too cute to pass. But if you must know, I’m Calamity. Or Calie, as you know me. I can’t help my nature. I was made for what I am. Their deaths don’t fuel me, but I have to keep moving; that’s what I’m made for. You have to understand that.”

He looked deep into her glistening, wet eyes.

The Prompts are from the book A Year of Creative Writing Prompts.

I liked today’s prompts. As per usual, I won’t polish them, but I’m happy for the ideas that were birthed from the prompts. Writing the prompts is like playing and having fun with a mild headache from the effort.

Thank you for reading ❤ I wish you all the creativity and happiness for today! Today is full of possibilities. Go out and play.