The exercise:
Hindsight, June Edition.
Mine:
I woke up, back next to the phone again, in a fog of black smoke. My head hurt, from where it had hit the wall, and my chest and arms and legs hurt from where the chairs had hit them. It took a few seconds for me to remember what had happened.
Well, what was still happening. There was a heck of a lot of smoke in that suite.
"Serena?"
When she didn't answer I thought for sure she was dead. Or at the very least unconscious. I managed to get to my hands and knees and crawled around looking for her. After checking everywhere she could have reasonably been, I headed for the door. By that point, between the smoke and the alarm and where I'd hit my head, I was starting to feel genuinely horrible.
I don't think I even really noticed that the door was already open.
There was still smoke in the hallway, but not as intense as in the suite. I used the door knob on the room opposite ours to haul myself to my feet. People were coming out of their rooms and running for the stairwell and so I, not having anything better to do, followed. But like, not running. It was more of a sliding my shoulder along the wall in a dazed shuffle.
I'd like to think the trail of blood I left in my wake saved at least a few lives. Kinda like how we'd mark trees in the woods when we were kids so that we could find our way back. Except that time we lost Ricky because it got dark and he... well, I mean I guess that was more about the bear than us forgetting to mark a few trees.
Anyway.
As people pushed and shoved their way down the stairs there was a lot of talk. Panicky nonsense, mostly, but what I remember most were the other people who had come from our old hotel. A few said it in a what a crazy world kind of way. One lady said it in a very, very angry kind of way. Most of them, though, said it in a very superstitious kind of way.
No. Suspicious. That's how they said it.
Whatever way they said it, they were all saying the same thing:
Another fire? What are the chances?
And, well, that got me to thinking...
3 comments:
A prompt for tomorrow? Well, given that I actually wrote the first 1200 words or so this morning while waiting for the prompt for today to go up (I get up early ok?) I'm going to suggest "Leaving Colorado" and provide you with absolutely no more than that :-p
I wasn't expecting Hindsight until next week, but when I checked the date I can see that that might have been cutting it a bit fine. I am pleased to have Hindsight though, especially with the way our poor (still nameless?) protagonist is starting to have the scales drop from his eyes regarding the radiant Serena. Also: it's June, so we're at the end of the first half-year. I know we still have to get our protagonist to Tokyo as that got referenced a lot back in Q1, but is there anything else that you would like to cover as part of the Hindsight? Now seems like a good time to check our plans.
I love the little details you drop in, by the way, like the bear, and the trail of blood on the hotel wall, and... well, the way the suspicions gradually get to him :)
And, looking at how much preamble I've written... expect two posts.
Hindsight
With hindsight, the fire investigators should have sat me down, given me a drink of water and asked me gentle questions about where Serena and I had been and what had happened just before the fire started. I was dazed enough I'd have just answered the questions and then I'm sure it would have been clear to everyone that there had been misunderstandings and confusion and that Serena was missing and I was worried she was trapped somewhere burning to death. Instead, almost as soon as I got outside I heard someone shout, "That's him!" and two well-built men in fire-fighting uniforms grabbed my arms and hauled me over to the fire-truck. Stood next to it was the same little, besuited, man that had told me we were getting a suite from the last hotel fire.
"Where is she?" he said, not even looking up from his paperwork.
"Where's who?" My head was pounding and my vision was a bit sparkly at the edges.
"Madame le Feu. The flame-fairy." I must have looked as vacant as I felt, because he looked at me, squinted at my eyes, and sighed. "That piece of ass you've been tapping."
I felt outraged, but it also felt distant, a bit like it was happening to someone else and I was just being told about it over the telephone. "I haven't slept with anyone since high school!" I said. "And in high school I never slept with anyone I wanted to." In hindsight, I should have been a bit more forceful about saying 'no' back then.
"The two of you have been sharing a room in every hotel you've burned down," he said. "Why on earth should I believe you're not sleeping with her? Or that you don't know where she is?"
"Because she ran off and left me to die in a burning hotel room," said a voice. It took me a moment to realise it was mine.
Another sigh. Another hard stare from him, this one scrutinizing me the way Ricky's dad looked at me after we came back home without him. Then he waved to the two fire-fighters who'd brought me here.
"Put him in my office," he said. "I think he's harmless, and you never know, if she's actually got feelings for him maybe he'll be bait."
Hindsight (continued)
Again: with the benefit of hindsight I should have tried the door after they took me to the office, because I don't remember them locking it. Maybe I could have left and found Serena and warned her that they were accusing her of burning things down, and maybe then things would have gone differently. Maybe I wouldn't have read about her in the paper, in an izakaya, two months later and then had nightmares for a week. But I just sat down gratefully in an old, overstuffed armchair and started to fall asleep. The besuited man came in after a while and woke me up and asked me a lot of questions, most of which didn't make sense. I answered all the ones I knew how to: where we'd come from, what our plans were, where we'd got the car from and how the fire had started. I think the besuited man looked actually startled when I told him about the fireworks in the oven.
"I just want to go home," I said, my words mangled by an enormous yawn. "I think I've seen enough of Canada."
"I wouldn't," said the man. He had calmed down again; he'd been very excited by the fireworks. "Someone burned the nursing home you used to work at down, and someone stole a car and then set it on fire, and lots of people think that someone is you. You should move somewhere else for a while. Go back home, maybe?"
I thought of my father and his burning house, and I have no idea why I didn't tell the besuited man that I'd left there until a pall of black smoke as well, but I guess, with hindsight, my brain finally realised that talking about all these fires wasn't a good thing.
"I always wanted to travel a bit," I said.
"Great," said the besuited man. "I can still give you a hotel room for the rest of your stay, though given you've been aiding and abetting I don't think there's a judge in this county that would make me. So... here you go." He handed me a sheet of paper. "The boys outside, Jared and Karim, will drop you off."
I stumbled out into the night, into the back of a car that smelled like wet dog, and woke up again to stumble into a hotel.
The next morning, although it was 2pm so maybe I should say the next afternoon, I discovered that my hotel was the airport Marriott and someone had left a note on my bedside table suggesting that flights to Tokyo at the moment were unusually affordable.
Greg - ask and ye have received.
I was glancing back over what I'd referenced in the opening and I think Tokyo is the only thing we've yet to investigate. I suspect I will have to reread everything a little more closely before jumping in to the second half of the tale next month. I think it's gone pretty well so far though!
Hah, love the details on his sex life, or lack thereof. And I appreciate that the gentleman in the suit came around to our (still nameless) narrator's side at the end there. He sure needed it.
And so you've managed to bring us to the brink of Tokyo! I'm excited to see where things go from here :)
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