Notes & Stuff (That Probably Won't Amount to Anything)

Habitual Elements

Assignment: write a (very) short story featuring a character experiencing five habitual elements - either traits of the character or routine/repeated elements of his/her environment.

The bran muffin Henry was eating was not quite stale yet, but the others he had purchased for breakfast the rest of the week most certainly would be long before he worked at choking them down. Or perhaps it wasn't stale at all, perhaps he was simply sick and tired of eating the dry, undelectable things. What was the point of living longer, he thought, if his only joy was eggs and bacon in the morning and a towering cheese burger with fries at night? These bran muffins were heavier than even the nasty weight they left in his belly.

He swept crumbs from his fingers, and a chirruping cough rose delicately from his clearing throat.

The muffins were just one of the myriad reasons Henry had for losing hope in the collapsing world. He looked warily at the newspaper, still rolled on the counter, ominous. Surely it would be filled with more gore than any of the Stephen King novels that lined the bookshelf in the living room. Those tomes were far less nightmare-inducing; Henry did not need psychotic clowns to be afraid when he lived in a world where everyday human beings walked the streets.

Another chirruping cough.

Perhaps, he thought, glancing at the window, he ought to just go back to bed and start over the next day. Count this one for a loss.

Who was he kidding, though? That could never work. For one, sleeping with any sort of solidarity was a joke to Henry. His head thrummed with memories the way the printing presses he repaired put off pages. Kerchunk, kerchunk, kerchunk, kerchunk.

And, perhaps worse, would be the press operators usual anger, heightened to a new level... for what he did not fix today, he would have to fix tomorrow, and no shop owner appreciated their presses being down. Even extenuating circumstances didn't rein in their annoyance if he took but a moment longer than they deemed reasonable - which was, of course, virtually no time at all. Besides that, sitting at home would lead to even more thinking - even more memories - even more terrible minutes to spend looking at headlines printed by the bastard presses he would repair...

Kerchunk, kerchunk, kerchunk.

So Henry got up and went to work, coughing as he gathered his toolkit, work orders, and keys. The house shook as the door closed behind him, settling into its continued silence. The bran muffin sat alone on its napkin, abandoned, left to harden in the air of Henry's empty kitchen.