Thursday, July 10, 2014

Fireflies - Day Fifteen (Live-Blogging A Story)

After 1,500 words yesterday, I feel like a total slouch only coming to you with 539 words.  But it was all I could do.  I had a hard time getting going today, so I ran out of time before I could get far.  The good thing is, I made it to the end of chapter nine, and chapter ten, which I'll start in on tomorrow, is the last chapter.

So, 539 today, 14,655 so far.  And here's today's allotment:


Every morning, Oscar woke up feeling like he’d been run over by a car.  He was getting so little sleep what with his son pestering him with constant appearances of his wife’s ghost.  He cried for long stretches of the night after each one, but even when the tears had dried, he still couldn’t manage to find the peaceful oblivion of sleep.  Instead he tossed and turned and stared at the ceiling.  When he closed his eyes, his mind would replay the film of the giant monster plunging down on Simi and enveloping her.  
Once, he opened his eyes to escape that film, only to find her apparition standing in the room.  He screamed, and grabbed the air horn to blast it, only to find he didn’t need it, because his scream had been enough to wake Trevon.
When morning came, Oscar would drag his aching, sleep-deprived body from the bed, dress for work, and take Trevon to be dropped off at the daycare center he’d found for him.  It pained Oscar each time he left him there.  Simi had been so very set against taking Trevon to daycare.  They’d waited so long for a baby, and the last thing she wanted was for the baby to be raised by strangers.  Especially considering that Oscar made plenty of money for the both of them.  Yes, she’d played cello in an orchestra and taught classes at San Francisco State, and those were very worthwhile and important endeavors, but to her, they paled in comparison to the awesome responsibility of raising a child.
He’d deferred to her wishes, and Trevon had never spent a moment in any else’s care.  But she was gone now, and there was nothing else he could do.  So, he would dump him off on strangers every morning on his way to work, and pick him up again around eight hours later, never knowing what he experienced while they were apart.  This did worry him, because of his special gift.  What new nightmares would he pick up from daycare.  But he had to let it slide, because he had no other choice.  He was a single parent now, and the bones were just going to have as they would.  His ability to control those things had left him when that monster had descended on his wife and tore her from his life.
It took a full month and a half after Simi’s death before things started to settle down and fall into a predictable pattern again.  Simi stopped her nightly appearances, instead opting for rare cameos that Oscar became more and more equipped to deal with and dispatch.  Oscar grew out of his funk as well.  When he was home in the evenings, he spent his time playing with Trevon, instead of propping him up in front of the TV.  God knew he’d seen enough Yo Gabba Gabba, Adventure Time, and Spongebob Squarepants to create fearsome nightmares enough to kill, maim, and destroy everything in Northern California, but the pipeline was being shut down.  Oscar knew he never should have opened it at all, but, regardless, he could at least shut it down now, before anything terrible happened.
Unfortunately, he was too late.

END OF DAY FIFTEEN

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