November 3, 2008

• More No Word

  Ok, so it's horribly rough and I'm over a day behind schedule... but there's some of it.
  

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  The moment Norman tried to turn the
  door knob and it didn't turn, he knew something was dreadfully wrong
  with his universe. And, in that moment, he knew that the idea was
  utterly ridiculous. Sure, it was odd that the door was locked at this
  time of day – his wife was usually in the middle of making dinner
  right around now – but maybe she'd locked it either accidentally or
  in a fit of absent-mindedness. Or maybe she stepped out. Or maybe...
  his train of thoughts started going down deeper and darker paths, but
  he soundly squelched it before it got far from the station. No,
  nothing terrible had happened. The door was just locked, that's all.
  People get premonitory warnings of great and terrible things in books
  and movies. It didn't happen in real life. Having won the brief
  mental argument with himself, Norman switched his briefcase from his
  left to his right hand and started absently fumbling for his house
  key.

  A drop of sweat trickled down his
  receding hairline and blinked its way across one eyelid. He shrugged
  it off with one suit-clad shoulder as he finally found the errant key
  and inserted it. It wouldn't turn. Again, a moment of panic overcame
  him, quickly calmed by his cooler thoughts. Why wouldn't it turn?
  Maybe there was something wrong with the key? He pulled it back out
  and brought it close to his eyes, its shiny length apparently clear
  of any burrs and obstructions. Now, his armpits dropped a freezing
  strand of sweat down the inside of his suit. He quickly punched the
  doorbell and resumed looking the key over in case she really wasn't
  home right now. The key still seemed in perfectly good working order.
  He put it back in and again tried turning it, this time applying more
  pressure. The key actually started twisting slightly before he gave
  up on it as a bad job, stepping back to leave the mildly mangled key
  in the lock. He swiped the growing perspiration on his forehead away
  with the back of his hand, his irritation growing. How long had his
  key not fit this lock, anyhow? He darted forward again, quickly
  twisting as if to trick the lock into letting him in, but to no
  avail. Finally, in exasperation, he reversed the motion, hoping to
  free the seemingly stuck lock. And it clicked open.

  He stood there in amazement, sun
  beating down on his brow, realizing his error. The lock turned the
  other way. He quickly swung the door open, ducked inside, and slammed
  it shut, enjoying the dark and the cool of the air conditioned house.
  Surely, none of the neighbors saw that... he took a few quick steps
  to one of the windows and peeked out the curtain for hidden
  observers. Suburbia seemed alive and well, and as quite and devoid of
  life as it usually was this time of day. Norman straightened from the
  window and automatically adjusted his tie. He mused that the
  situation with the door being locked had put him more on edge than he
  might have expected. True, it was out of the ordinary, but it had
  happened before, why just... Norman stopped and stood a while in
  thought. It had been at least a year, he realized. Always, his wife
  was there when he came home from work. And when they went out, she'd
  always taken great pride in getting the door for him, something to do
  with her childhood making her want to feel useful, she'd said. That
  silly moment of dread had made him panic, and made him forget that
  he'd installed that lock years ago, when they'd just bought the
  house, and he hadn't realized that he'd put things in backwards until
  too late. They'd had a lot of laughs about that, he remembered, along
  with all of his other mishaps as he'd tried to “become the proper
  husband” as he'd said back then, insisting on doing all of the
  house repairs himself. It was her who'd brought him back to Earth,
  pointing out that he was spending more money between building
  supplies, medical supplies, and hiring repairmen to fix his projects
  than he was saving by doing them himself. She'd had charts, he
  remembered, bar graphs and pie charts. She always did know the way to
  get through to him. That night he put those tools away in the shed
  for good, she showed him that she still appreciated him and thought
  he was quite the proper husband. Norman was lost in his thoughts when
  something beeped and brought him out of it.

  His automatic reaction was to bring
  his right hand down to the holster on his hip, slide out his cell
  phone and flip it open. Nothing. The display was the usual one, his
  wife holding up her hand, mostly blocking the camera phone. The
  minute ticked over on the digital display. The battery power was at
  least half full, so it wasn't this that beeped. In retrospect, Norman
  realized that the sound of the beep had been different from that of
  the cell phone, more brassy and insistent.

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  Unfortunately, I can't submit it to the NaNoWriMo site to update my word count because they're horribly overloaded and the page isn't loading. They saw this drops off shortly after the first week.

  • 12:31 am
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