Time for another Oh, Write! scribble! This one is based on a prompt from the very first issue: Write a scene documenting your main character’s nightly routine. This is the first time I’ve written this character, and I had fun!
Dr. Anderson Geist didn’t have much advice for getting a good night’s sleep. In leur mind, the brain’s internal landscape tended to be as chaotic as the external world itself. One couldn’t interact with all that beauty and terror without absorbing some of it. The mind would offer psychological white noise—brain static, Dr. Geist liked to call it—or screamless terrors in one’s sleep. The odds of which were mostly a roll of the dice.
In fact, Dr. Geist suspected that the more complicated one’s nightly routine, the more strictly kept, the worse off one would be. Leur only real night-time routine was daydreaming. This didn’t count though, because lui was almost always daydreaming. The parallel narrative of other people’s lives—some lui’d glimpsed years ago, other who lui’d seen just the other day. How many people could a person pass by in a lifetime? How many faces, seen on the other side of a store aisle or car windshield or drive-thru window?
When lui drifts off to sleep, Dr. Geist often wonders about their stories. Did the mother ever get her toddler calm, since they had screamed so loudly as she loaded groceries loaded into the trunk? Had it been a tantrum? When was that little one’s birthday? Was she expecting another one soon—or trying?
And what of the barista at the coffee shop on the corner? Did bright hair colors come as part of the job description? Dr. Geist was quite sure every barista in every coffee shop lui’d gone to either had bright hair, some kind of asymmetrical cut, or a mixture of both. The barista lui was thinking of hadn’t tended customers in perhaps six months. They’d had deep green hair, the color of pines and winter forests. It had given their skin a burnt orange glow that reminded el of a last burst of fall foliage in the late afternoon sun. Lui always had the feeling of leaving, when they spoke. A sense of goodbye.
Dr. Geist does not look for answers. Lui does not pry into the lives of others, either directly or through any medium of snooping. No, lui simply wishes these perfectly average, wonderfully extraordinary people well. An unexpected delight to brighten their day. A little treat to take the edge off their worries, should they have any. A hand to hold if they would like it, or time alone to contemplate. Lui cannot guess what it is that people need, but whatever it might be, lui hopes each person will have it by some proper, fortuitous means.
It is in the middle of such daydreaming as lui drifts into leur sleeping; the drifting of thoughts that can barely be called praying, as lui is cast in the spell of sleep; the litany spoken for nameless strangers to spare them undue headaches—it is on the far edges of this exercise that leur house phone rings.
The lulled whisper of faces and fortunes recedes as lui finds himself awake. Leur eyes open and it is leur mind that sits up, half-alert, reaching for particulars. Lui was sleeping—or had been. The room is dark, as it should be. It’s not that hour of night which promises or portents bad news, but it is quite past the hour for any sort of business calls. An automated voice recites the calling number aloud.
262…901…317…
It occurs to el that the phone number could be made entirely of area codes. That’s impossible, of course, because phone numbers have seven digits. Ten, with the area code. Eleven, if it was with that +1 lui sees now-days. None of those numbers are divisible by three, so the phone number can’t be only area codes. But it sounds close enough. It sounds…true. The same way north is more and less true, depending on where you find yourself in relation to a strong magnet or two.
Dr. Geist does not get out of bed to answer, even as the automated voice starts in on its second recitation of the caller’s number. Although lui can hear the phone ringing, and the dial-dead robotic voice programmed into its plastic casing, lui does not know where the phone actually is. The base, with the answering machine, is in the kitchen—where all answering machines should be. The message tape is more than half full, like all tapes tend to be. Although lui spends leur Saturday mornings clearing out the tape, writing out post cards in response instead of returning most calls, the tape never fails to fill quickly.
“I just thought you should know.”
There is no preamble. The caller is perfectly composed, and yet Dr. Geist pictures a person with squared shoulders, a brave face, and wet eyes. Perhaps they are not crying now—they’re through with it, as it will serve no practical purpose at this point—but they have eaten their fair share of grief. Lui does not know what lui means by this thought, only that it is as true as the degrees on a compass.
Dr. Geist is also certain that, if lui would have answered the phone, the speaker would have said the exact same thing, the exact same way, regardless of whether lui’d said anything or not. Closing leur eyes in the dark, leur mind settles back into its covers. This could be a warning, among any number of other things. But whatever this is or could be, it is not an apology.
“When the time comes, you will. I know you will.” A beat, not quite a sigh; too quiet to be a breath. “I just thought you should know.”
A click.
That middle line echoes to el at the end. Something about that not-quite-accent. An almost-lilt. I know you well. Lui waits until Saturday to go through leur messages. Lui always has. Today is Wednesday—or was, or would be, or could be. Lui can’t quite remember at the moment. It is the middle of the week and lui is on the edge of sleep but lui thinks lui will listen to the message again in the morning.
And maybe, just once, before lui goes to sleep. Anderson Geist finds the idea comforting.
V. H. King's Ink 
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