NAG ME PLEASE

This is a ploy to motivate myself. For months, I've been half-working on a short story called The Waiting Room. I want to finish it. It could be a pretty good Twightlight-Zoney Halloweeny thingamabob. So I'm giving myself an October 31 deadline to get this bugger done and up. 

Here's a wee preview. If it interests you, or if it doesn't and you just want to help me accomplish a thing, please please nag me regularly and remind me that I said it would be done. Remind me how many days I have left. If you spy me screwing around on FB, call me out and shoo me back to work. You have my permission to be horribly obnoxious. This is your task. So let's go: 

I thought once the baby was born I might be called out. We keep saying the metaphor rules the world. Once we’re done waiting, we’ll get called out. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone called out, though. I think I would remember it.

The room smells of old coffee and latex. I reclined across the end table to push – hard plastic chairs bolted down; there was no other way to lean back, and I would not lay on the floor. I would not. Her newborn self nearly fell, but by some miracle of anxious hands she splashed into the unwelcoming yellow seat, slipping like a melting ice cube around its shallow bowl. Her tiny body slid through my fingers when I reached for her. The others huddled in the corner with their eyes turned down while I cleaned her off and apologized over and over.

We had privacy for a while, back before all the sheets wore through. It’s been a long time since anything new arrived. It feels like a long time. We held a vote about the sheets to decide whether physical or emotional comfort was the better use for them. It was close. My side -- Marco, Harry Potter, psychokitten and I -- argued that the sheets were too thin to stop us shivering anyway, and we won. We shoved the corners between the ceiling tiles and pretended that every deep breath didn’t make the walls flutter.

When the sheets were up we tiptoed around and talked in whispers, as though the illusion of separation somehow made it more important that we not disturb each other. I remember suddenly feeling the need to ease my weight into the seats to stop them from creaking.

Begonia donated her extra hand towel to wrap the baby up in. (Everyone said that towel was stolen anyway. No one remembers from whom.)  Begonia has lost the hat that gave her her name. We don’t know how things get lost in here. Maybe it disintegrated. It was old already when we first saw her.

Begonia doesn’t mind the baby crying. She has no patience with anyone else’s noise. She used to wake everyone up in the night to stop snorers, back when we still tried to keep day and night. We don’t turn the lights out often anymore. Harry Potter has night terrors, so we stopped doing night. It didn’t make sense anyway. 

to be continued ...