It’s been awhile since I’ve written 100 words. Stick-to-it-iveness has never been a strong suit; nevertheless, I’m going to write tonight because I feel like it. And it’s almost November! :)

I’m going to use the words carousel, jambalaya, and nonsense in a story, the opening line of which is…

Sometimes I feel like a gerbil, running around and around on her wheel. Which is funny to think of, since I don’t really remember what a gerbil looks like. The internet is gone and there aren’t any books here so it’s not like I can look it up. I just sit and think a lot. Sometimes I walk. There’s not much else to do anymore, most days.

Oh, sometimes I wake up to find that it’s snowed. Or rained. One time, I even opened the front door and found the air full of locusts. (And when I say full, I mean thick as a shag rug – if shag rugs could fly and decimate crops.) It was real plague-type stuff. Almost laughable, really, after everything that’s happened, that the cogs would still be thick with that nonsense. I mean, after the theater’s empty and the show closed, who are the actors playing for?

Because one day, I woke up, and it was all gone. All the cars, all the people, all the cats, all the birds, all the books – all of it, all gone. I’m sitting in my living room, writing this, and I can still see the spot between the ugly carousel lamp and the ficus tree where the TV used to be. Just an empty spot, not even dust bunnies like someone had just grabbed it and stolen it. It was just…gone.

I was pretty freaked out for awhile. I went pounding on people’s doors, but of course no one was there. (None of their TVs were there, either.) I cried. I got angry and broke someone’s wind chimes. I was a little nuts for awhile. It seemed like a long while.

But then I started to notice things. Like downtown, how the lights at the Jambalaya Kitchen suddenly lit up again at night, spelled out just right even though the “y” had been broken years and years ago, and Tom Gladwell had always been too cheap to fix it. Like how suddenly the roof on the house next door was suddenly straighter, as if it hadn’t been left to fall to pieces when Mr. Jensen had left Mrs. Jensen for his auto mechanic lover. Like how I woke one morning to the sound of the wind chimes I’d shattered when it had all first happened.

And then sometimes, they go the other way. Sometimes, I pass by the Jensen’s, and the roof…well, it flickers. Like I can see what it used to look like, before it was fixed. I got a little crazy, then, too. Because if it went backwards, why couldn’t it go backwards to before everything was gone? I thought it would go further. It just about killed me, the waiting for it. Waiting for it to undo, waiting for it to fix itself, and for me to just step right back into it, as if nothing had ever happened. I’d made that promise – if it went back to how it was, I wouldn’t say a word. I wouldn’t tell a single soul. That was all my chips on the table. That was me going all in.

Of course, here I still am, right here next door to the Jensen’s perfect roof. Not good enough, my best offer. House wins.

I think a lot about the movie Castaway, how he makes that volleyball (or was it a soccer ball?) into a head and talks to it. I tried to try that, but apparently sports were eliminated as well. I have furniture, but it’s harder than you think to be friends with a sofa. For awhile I tried talking to myself, but it got hard to tell my voice from my thoughts, and that freaked me out almost as bad as the morning I woke up to this.

I spend a lot of time looking at my hands and my feet, and the other parts of my body that I can still see, because there aren’t any mirrors and nothing here reflects. I check myself for the flickering. I wonder if I will be undone, somehow. Or suddenly not here, like before I was born.

I never get the feeling that someone is here with me; I know there is no one. That’s just the thing, see. It’s cogs, still running – nothing else. Backwards, and the flickering is it dying down. The lifeless cogs are dying down; the big show is over.

I’m still running around and around on this wheel. There isn’t much else to do.

Er…that turned out a lot less cheery than I imagined it. Still: 100 words, done! ;)

Chapter One: A non-tropical heatwave

“Ed, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, BUT THE AIR CONDITIONING IN THIS RUN-DOWN RAT-TRAP IS BROKEN AND I’M MELTING!”

Edward Denby remained unmoving in his chair, his hands laced and resting on his waist. A wet cloth was draped over his face. “If I say I have noticed, will it stop you from complaining?”

“You bet your ass it won’t!”

“So then my motivation for discussing it with you would be…?”

Unceremoniously, the cloth was ripped from his face. His assistant Delphi stood before him, her green eyes flashing a thin sheen of sweat covering her face. She was angry, which was a good look for her. He wisely kept the thought to himself.

Here’s this next week’s 100-word entry. I had the blues tonight, a bit.

She never told him what it was, the grief that stole over her during these moments. He wasn’t sure she knew what it was herself, the thieving sorrow that took her away from him to some place where he couldn’t follow. Between them were all the vastness of her sorrow, and all the aching in him to fix it, the desperate tugging at his inside when he saw her go so still and joyless.

So he drove, ripping through the stillness of the desert night. Sometimes she would just sit motionless, her eyes staring out at the dark while the gravel under the tires roared like a hurricane and the wind whipped her face raw. He would push the pedal down, spiting death at every turn to try to coax her back to him, but somehow each time they made it around a curve she remained untouched.

Sometimes she would cry, tears sliding down her cheeks in silence. Her wet cheeks would glow, luminescent in the light of instrument panel. He would reach over and take her hand, turn up the stereo and sing to her simply because he didn’t know what else to do.

And sometimes it was like this – stars and inky night and his fair girl sitting beside him with her eyes closed, the two of them in his car, the hours whirling past them in the darkness until at last, she would softly steal her little hand into his and press it into his.

Later, he reached across the bed for her and felt the warmth of her body. She moved next to him in the darkness and pulled him across the space between them. Afterwards, she lay in his arms breathing softly in sleep, he thought how the night, when it was over, would be one less night he would be alive. He thought of them in his car. He shut his eyes and remembered the smell of heat in the damp earth. He shut his eyes and he could see her sitting beside him, smiling and happy. His girl.

He held tight to her, dreaming as the hours went by, unslept.

Frank flat-palmed the door to the kitchen, put his hands on his hips, then snorted to announce himself. Jenna turned quickly, her face registering surprise at his entrance. She raised a wooden spoon towards him and narrowed her eyes. “What are you doing in here? I asked you to mingle!”

“I cannot mingle when our baby sister is out there on the edge of disaster!”

Jenna rolled her eyes. “Calm down, Frank, your queen is showing. Now what the hell are you talking about?”

“It’s him,” Frank hissed, jabbing violently towards the dining room, “That – that ass!”

“Darling,” Jenna replied, “you’re going to have to be much more specific about to whom you are referring. There are a whole herd of asses out there.”

I don’t know what this is about, but it’s over 100 words, so I’m clear. Whoo!

“Kerry, there you are!”

The hairs at the back of Kerry’s neck bristled and she shut her eyes, willing herself to control her breathing. Slowly, she turned, switching on her best smile.

“Alison! There you are. How are you?”

Next to her, Shawn stiffened slightly. Kerry knew that if she turned to look at him, she’d see him looking like a deer on a railroad track. Her smile sharpened at his discomfort. I know, you bastard, she thought. I know all about you two.

She reached out to receive Alison’s arms-length air kisses, and then took a step back to allow Alison to see her standing next to Shawn.

Alison gave a brilliant smile. Kerry turned to Shawn, and patted his chest possessively. “This is my fiance, Shawn Petrie. Shawn, this is Alison Howard from our legal department.”

Alison lowered her head slightly, gazing up at him through her eyelashes, and reached out to shake his hand. Shawn jostled Kerry aside slightly in the rush to take her hand. Kerry smiled up at him, purposefully averting her eyes from their touch.

Her heart pounded wildly in her chest, and it took all her will not to turn her head and watch them. Instead, she focused on a wilting ficus tree in the corner of the room.

“And a good bargain he made of it, too! No donkey quite so reliable as old Stinky Sally.” The devil gave a dazzling smile.

Nick exhaled noiselessly, running his hands through his hair. It was growing uncomfortably hot in the bathroom.

“So – so what are you going to do to me? Are you going to crash the plane? Am I going to burn to death?”

“Burn you? Burn you, dear boy? Of course not. What good would that do me? No, no – I need your help, Nicholas.”

“Help? From me? But aren’t you the devil? Don’t you have magical devil powers?”

“To tell you the truth,” the devil said, lowering his voice to a confidential tone, “My powers are grossly exaggerated.”