Morning all and welcome to Thursday. Today I woke up three minutes before my alarm clock AND for the first time all week my nose was not stuffed up. A chorus of angel’s rejoiced. Or at least i smiled. So shall we get into our morning prompt? good, Once, Twice and Thrice we go…
I am not entirely sure where this is going but I suspect Dave is no longer alone on the island and might have a very difficult three weeks ahead of him. Just a hunch.
Thursday, March 16th: The shore was littered with wooden planks.
The shore was littered with wooden planks. Dave blinked at them. He was certain they had not been there the day before. He looked around, his puzzlement growing. There was no sign as to where they came from. They were close to the water’s edge so he supposed they washed ashore rather than somehow being spat out of the forest. Dave smiled to himself.
“Trees keeping lumberjacks out by spitting out pre-sawn planks,” he said to himself, even as he scanned the surface of the water. The ocean was never really sill but right now with no wind blowing and the sky a bowl of unmarred blue it was as placid as it ever was. There was no sign of a shipwreck or some other disaster that could have cast the planks ashore.
Thinking he might learn something more from the planks themselves he ambled towards the nearest one.
“Not that a shipwreck seems likely,” he thought. Most ships he knew had fiberglass hulls these days unless they were things like giant metal barges or even cruise ships. “I suppose some sailing ships have wooden hulls,” he mused as he approached the first plank. He doubted that was likely. Most of those ships were small and his island was well out of their reach.
He poked the plank with his foot. There were no markings on the plank. There were no curves and no nail holes either. It was as though it dropped straight from a lumberyard and floated over a vast ocean just to find him on his little research station.
“Maybe a passing barge dropped a shipment,” he mused as he began moving towards the next plank. It too was as unrevealing as the first. He kept going giving each separate plank a general study. None of them held any clues as to their origins.
He frowned. He studied the plank. “Oak,” he thought. “Maybe.” It looked sort of like oak to him but in all fairness most of the wood he came in contact with was in his grandfather’s workshop and as his grandfather died when he was eight years old, it was a long ago memory.
Again Dave had no answers. He checked his watch and realized it would soon be time to take measurements again. His free time was, for the moment, at an end.
“Only three more weeks,” he told himself. The thought was a cheering one. In three weeks there would be a ship sent to pick him up and drop someone else off. There were rules about how long anyone could stay at this outpost alone and he was almost at the limit. In truth he hadn’t found it to be that taxing of an endeavor. There was the annoyance of the measurements. They couldn’t all be taken at once. Some were taken hourly outers every six hours and still others once a day. They were staggered so his days were carved up into little slices.
It was hardly worth getting involved in anything because as soon as he did, the timer would go off and a measurement needed to be taken. He knew that it was important work and that it needed to be done. Still he read the same paragraph five times last night as the interruptions separated the sentences from their meaning.
He was looking forward to sitting down on one of the deck chairs as the ship took him away from the island and actually reading an entire chapter all the way through. His steps veered away from the beach.
Ten til Midnight 