Morning all and welcome to Friday. For the first time all week the sun was actually hining when I got up this morning. There are clouds but they are thin things compared to the rest of the week and no actual rain is falling. As the yard has become rather bog like this too is a very good thing. It also means I am slightly more awake feeling as I start my day. Which is a nice change. So let’s take this awake feeling into a morning prompt. Are you ready? Then let’s go.
I like the idea of a familiar space becoming strange as it is viewed in a different light. The person and their perceptions changing rather than the actual space. No clue where this is going, but I like that idea.
Friday, February 3rd: The cut bled sluggishly.
The cut bled sluggishly. ‘That means it’s not too deep,’ he thought. That had to be a good thing. He worried about getting something in the wound, but didn’t want t accidentally reopen it. The had a pocket knife in his pocket. I aw about the size of his pinky finger and in all of the time he had it on his keyring he never actually used it. Carrying it was a holdover from his childhood. When he was little his father, grandfather, uncles, all the men he knew actually, related or not, carried some sort of knife with him. At ten he was deemed old enough for a swiss army knife and had been given one for his birthday and shown proper knife maintenance.
Due to all of the security checks he had to go through in his daily basis, he long ago fell out of the habit of keeping it in his pocket. But something wouldn’t let it leave the habit behind all together. So he had a small, delicate even knife as part of his keyring.
‘I suppose it had to come in handy at some point in time.’ He took out his keys and cupped them tightly, trying not to let them jangle as he pulled out the blade. He untucked his shirt and cut off a strip of his undershirt. Then he took the strip and wrapped it around the still bleeding cut on his left arm, pulling the cloth tight by gripping one end with his teeth as the other hand pulled.
As secure as he was going to get, Dave put his small knife and keyring back into his back pocket. Feeling better for having done this much, he looked around. The familiar office space was now a strange battlefield. The cubicles here were the tall kind that actually gave the illusion of walls, albeit padded ones. There was about two feet between them and the ceiling instead of rising only tall enough to give a seated person privacy.
While it shielded him from view it also shielded anyone else. He looked at the phone. Both it and the computers were useless at the moment. Both the phone lines and the internet connections were cut. As he entire office used wireless internet for bith internet and phone, he assumed that there was some sort of network jamming device rather than someone with with a pair of wire cutters. The regular electricity was also out cutting off the elevators and most of the lights. There were emergency lights stationed around the building. They gave the office an almost amber glow due to the yellowish lens over the light. He didn’t know if it was just old or designed that way for some reason.
He found out earlier that there were people stations at the stairwells. Newly bandaged he tried to think through the options left to him.
Ten til Midnight 