NaNoWriMo '09 - day one

“Why are you afraid of me?”

Sleep did not leave her in slowly shed layers as it usually did.  She woke suddenly and fully, eyes flying open to a still, dark room.  Dream fragments danced away from her, shattered by her sudden waking.

She blinked at the darkness around her.  It was still night then, or early morning.  The sun was not up yet.  Dark, but too dark.  No light shine came in her windows from street lamps outside.  There was no minute red glow from her alarm clock’s face.

The power was out on her street again.  Probably the whole neighborhood.

The only reliable thing about her power company was its unrealibility.

Groaning, she reached out in the dark and groped on her bed side table for her cell phone.  She would have to call in the outage, then sit around in the dark waiting on them to fix it. 

If they ever did.

Meanwhile, by the time they restored her service it would probably be time to get up anyway.

Why did these things always happen on work nights, she wondered, then I could just sleep through it.  And where was that phone?

Probing blindly in the dark her fingers had encountered the useless alarm clock, her glass of water, and the spine of the novel she had been reading before bed.

No phone to be found.

Downstairs then.

Silently she cursed having never brought a flashlight upstairs, or even some candles.  Even a scented aroma therapy candle would be better than the darkness offered by the center of the house.

If I don’t kill myself going down, she thought, it will be a mirical.

She paused briefly at the top of the stairs.  A thin grey light filtered in from the large picture window.  Moonlight, she realized.

Something so rarely seen in the city.  Normally its white light was overshadowed by the harsher yellow lights of the street lamps and dozens of homes and businesses burning their thousands of electric bulbs.

Natures flashlight, she thought, and started down.

Halfway to the bottom she froze with one foot on a step and one foot hovering in mid air.  Her right hand gripped the railing tightly.

Something was wrong in the house.

It is just quiet, she told herself.  You are just hearing the night noises.

Still she did not move, just strained to hear what she thought she had heard.

Nothing.

She was about to start down when she heard it again, and knew what it was she was hearing.

1 comments:

Glynis Peters said...

Keep it coming! Good luck!