Day 34

                  Start writing again today!  I overslept and I might not have a chance to get this done.  I was overambitious with the alarm clock so I must have woken up and turned it off without any awareness of what I was doing.  Now I've got an hour and a half to do this.

                 Edit:  Now I finished this after work right before the cutoff.  Go me.   Thought it turned out ok though.  Finally got something to happen.  Sort of described it.  Atleast kind of getting the concept.  It's like cooking from scratch.  I know Bronco is probably completely two dimensional to you guys, but I have a general idea of who he is and it seems like he should be able to handle himself in these weird situations.  Weakest part was the Mr. Haisley thing yesterday, but at some point I am going to have to write about a guy meeting with his boss at work, so I might as well get the shitty ones out of the way.  Hard work and dedication?  Yeah.
           Plus, it's only day 34.  Let's see how day 68 looks compared to this.  You gotta start somewhere.

               

            He combed through the obituaries with a steaming cup of cocoa and a pair of readinglasses that still had the tag sticking out from the top.  The peered over the paper from his corner table at Pancake Variety House, seeing cheepskate dads and their unhappy families eating unholy piles of fluff.  Bronco, wearing his Denver Broncos jersey and NFL champions hat, looked more suspicious than he realized.  The waitresses were discussing their prospects from the safe overhead fluorescent lights of the hostess station, he had been there for hours already and was inadvertently making a spectacle of himself.

            “More coffee?” A waitress made her rounds, Bronco pushed an oversized mug out to the edge of the table like a prisoners bowl. 

            The hotel was on the other side of the block, standing there like a stable for purebred horses.  It was a more upscale joint,  Bronco felt like a sore thumb around its inhabitants and preffered this cross the street vibe.  It was past two-thirty, the sun was peeking between its cloud hands at it’s domain below.  All the old people were out running errands, the bus stops were littered with them. 

            “Is that your car?” An important looking restaurant professional asked Bronco.  Concerned, Bronco looked up.  “Yeah.  What about it?”  He said.

            “Just admiring it.”  He said in an ominous tone.

            “Yeah, it’s a nice car, yeah I know it is.”  Bronco folded the paper against his hand.  Suddenly all the eyes at the bar were focused out the window at Bronco’s vehicle.  “What?”  He asked petulantly.  “Some unwritten code against guys like me?”

            Bronco stuck around for twenty minutes to prove he wasn’t afraid or uncomfortable.  He stared at the clock furtively, fighting back as much of the coffee as he could.  He wasn’t a coffee drinker.  He left four dollars on the table and got up to leave.

            Getting into the car, everything inside the pancake house had gone back to normal.  He thought he must have violated some unwritten law about sitting too long.  Or maybe an important person needed that booth.  Twenty seconds later, he was out on the road.

            Pushing the front door open slowly, there were no signs of commotion or action coming from the inside of the room.  He checked the answering machine, no new messages.  He relistened to the one about the guy sending the other guy over, and tried to piece together what reaction the voice on the other end would have to knowing one of his men disappeared under Bronco’s watch.

            Opening the fridge, Bronco grabbed six cans of Busch Light by their plastic rings and cleared a spot off on the couch.  He flipped the TV on.  The basement door loomed across the room, enormous in its presence.  He pictured what he knew to be behind it, his head pounding with disbelief.  He pulled the envelope Mr. Haisler gave him out of his jacket pocket and set it on the table, he wasn’t in the mood to go to the litigators.

            Three beers in, the characters on TV sitcoms started to get more friendly.  The newsladies winked and told their stories tongue in cheek, lurching forward and lecherously breathing into Bronco’s space.  His favorite sports teams were all playing, although none of them had been scheduled for that night.  He kicked his feet up and sat back on the long purple couch, feeling genuinely good for the first time in weeks.

            Bronco’s eyes closed and opened and closed and remained shut.  The street lights came on.  A drop of invisible moisture fell in a constant stream on the bridge of his nose.  He dreamed he was being skipped in line again and again to get onto the magic hippo ride.  His tiny friend gripped his jacket resolutely, staring up at Bronco with his upper dental arcade over his lower lip.

            Bronco jumped to his feet, threw a throw pillow across the room and caught the couch behind him with an oustretched backwards hand.  He stood on tiptoe for a minute, startled by a sound he thought he might have heard.  The wind swept the shutters against the side of the house, the front door towered like an obelisk.  He had ran out of beer, he realized, looking in the fridge, which looked especially clean because it was empty.  There was cheese in the door.  The microwave clock repeated 12:00 infinitely.

            He squeezed a frozen burrito out of it’s plastic encasement onto a plate and threw it into the microwave.  He watched it spin as the timer counted down, but got dizzy and had to steady himself by looking down at his feet.  There was a loud squeek from the upstairs room with the red chair.  He stared at nothing in particular, trying to dull his sight so his ears would work better.  There it was again.  A fast rustling sounded like visible damage to his stairs.  At the same moment, through the window Bronco swore he saw a tree which was visibly getting taller and shorter in rapid succession.

           He grabbed the phone off of its cradle on the wicker table and phoned his sister.

            “Arty?”  She asked, bewildered.  “Arty, it’s past 2 in the morning.”

            “Sis,”  Bronco didn’t correct her that he was now Bronco.  “Some weird things are happening here.  I don’t think it’s just in my mind.”

            “Are you drinking again, Art?”  She asked, wiping her eyes.  “Art, it’s ok if you are.  But I’m sure it’s just the wind.  It’s getting really windy out there.”

            A bump gurgled toward him through the darkness, and a sound as if an ottoman was being dragged across the floor sent a bassy timbre into the carpet where it disappeared.  “Sis, I gotta go.”  Arty briefly felt nostalgia after hearing her voice.  She didn’t protest as he hung up the phone, only saying “Goodnight, Arty.”

            He crawled across the basement floor to the bottom of the stairs.  The chair was no longer in the middle of the room, and a thick mist hung in the upstairs like a rainforest.  The stairs appeared to have been pulled through a funhouse mirror while retaining the optical illusions.  Bronco sat prone.