Wednesday July 4th, 2012

The exercise:

In a suitable follow up to yesterday's prompt, today we write about: waking.

All right, I finally managed to get a picture of one of our restaurant deliveries:


From left to right: two pints of raspberries, two pounds of salad blend, two more pounds of salad blend, three pounds of kale, five pounds of shelling peas, five more pounds of shelling peas, and six more pints of raspberries.

We actually managed to get through an entire day without any rain falling. I honestly don't remember the last time that happened.

Mine:

He wakes with a start, arms and legs flailing as he struggles to free himself from his tangled sheets. Sitting upright in bed, his breathing ragged, he searches his bedroom for the source of the noise that had interrupted his dreamless sleep.

Finding nothing out of place, he tries to recall what, exactly, had disturbed him. A car alarm? That doesn't feel right, and the street outside his window is silent.

Perhaps the neighbor's cat had found another stray to scrap with and their screeches had pierced his slumber. But no, that doesn't seem right either. It had been calmer than that, almost matter of fact.

A voice?

No, that would be impossible. The doors and windows are locked, he'd made sure of that before turning in. No one else owned a key and the house alarm is top of the line. And yet...

Shaking his head, he climbs out of bed and heads for the bathroom, thinking to relieve himself and splash cold water on his now sweaty face. He flicks on the light and freezes in place, the writing on the mirror triggering his memory. That's it, he thinks. Those were the words that woke me.

Smeared in his late wife's red lipstick, the message is short and to the point.

You're next

5 comments:

Greg said...

All those fruit and vegetables look very tasty! I bet the people eating at the restaurants will be pretty pleased as well :) ...and is that your new deck underneath the vegetables, by any chance?
Congratulations on a dry day, too. We seem to still be getting plenty of rain for the next few days, but I'm quite happy about that, I like the rain.
I really like the build up to the words on the mirror. It's convincing, and gets progressively scarier – not, perhaps, jump out of you skin scary, but the tension is definitely there. And the message on the mirror is almost perfect. I'd have probably liked something a little extra, just to make the message yours instead of the slightly generic feel it has, but it's good nonetheless.

Waking
The princess twitched, suddenly aware that she was asleep. Her eyes flickered beneath her eyelids, and she rolled on to her side, her mind slowly coming back up to speed and realising that she was waking up. An urge to yawn came over her, and she stretched her arms out, heaving her chest up and yawning fit to break her jaw off. Her eyes opened as her mouth closed, and she felt for a moment as though she'd slept for a thousand days.
A dwarfish little man with an unkempt beard, who was clutching a rusty pair of garden shears, was watching her. She frowned, wondering why an obvious servant was in her bedroom.
Then she took in the state of the room – the fallen masonry, the cobwebs and the sprawling plant growth. It looked like her room had been unoccupied for a hundred years.
"What is – Where are – Who are you?" she said, struggling to work out what question to ask first.
"I'm your Prince Charming," said the dwarfish man in a glutinous voice. He smelled, she noticed, of fish. "I woke you with a kiss, so you're mine now."
The Princess started screaming, so loud that he was forced to back away, and so she carried on until he backed against a low stone wall, fell backwards over it, and plummeted out of the tower.
"Dear Gods," she said, getting her breath back. "I swear I was just going to have a power nap."

Anonymous said...

Waking 

We were driving towards the city from the north; we could see the city skyline in the distance; we’d just traded the Mercedes in for a Honda Odyssey, second hand, grey colour like the Merc was. Hubby tested it for torque, it went weird, started to go fast, then slowed right down, pulling to the left. It cycled like this twice (electrical interference?) We thought, oh no, not another dud car, I said “You can fix it, it will give you something to do, don’t worry.” 
The sky was full of dark grey clouds, like dusk, maybe it was dusk or approaching dusk.
Then the sky went really, really bright like brighter than noon and I saw spot fires around the city and I knew what it was, I grabbed hubby and said “Oh no!” and he said “What?” 
I said “It’s okay,” and the sky turned to night, then the mushroom cloud fireball lit up and its shock wave headed towards us and I yelled, “I love you, I love you, I love you...” and I felt us cleave together bodily as we fried in the holocaust.
I awoke.
 

Marc said...

Greg - not our deck, I took that picture up at Kat's parents place. I will share pictures of ours eventually, it's just that work has been paused for quite a while now.

Haha, fun take on the prompt. Hopefully her next prince is a little more to her liking!

Writebite - eek, that's a disturbing dream. It has that nice blend of normal and strange that seems to make dreams particularly troubling.

Unknown said...

I lay in bed, my arm slung over and hanging off the side like dead weight. It had been a long night and although I had managed to rack up three hours of uninterrupted sleep, I was much too tired to move. My eyes fluttered open and then closed again as I repeatedly tried to work my way out of the fog of sleep just long enough to read the bold red numbers plastered across the face of my alarm clock. The third time wasn’t the charm, nor was the 10th. An hour, possibly two, must have passed before my senses reached out to the world. The smell of something glorious reached my nose, pulling me from sleep. Minutes passed and finally my brain processed the enticing aroma. I sat up and exclaimed to the empty room, “Oh My God, its Bacon!”

Marc said...

Morrigan - mmm, bacon is a fan-damned-tastic way to wake up in the morning.

I can totally relate to the struggle of escaping sleep. That's pretty much me every morning.

Blink, blink, where did the time go?