New Year, Actual Content?

Trying to decide if I want to blog, and if so if I want to blog here, and if so what about and if not where then.

Day 25 of 30: Meeting Cancelled

Gwen was down by the college for a meeting that got cancelled, so she decided to surprise Daniel. She came into the office with high hopes of reconnecting with her husband.

"You want to see Daniel?" the administrative assistant said. She looked like several women Gwen knew; dressing a little too young.

"Is he in?" Gwen asked.

"He's in class right now, then he has his office hours," the admin said.

"I'll wait for him in there then."

The admin wavered. "All right."

Danny came in with a TA. No surprises there. "Hello, darling," she said, just a shade too possessively.

"Hello. Everything all right?"

"Never better. I was in the neighborhood and thought we could have lunch."

"You should've called. I've already made plans." He didn't quite look at the TA (Gwen did), but it was clear enough.

"And?" she said, a little too brightly.

"And I can break them," he acquiesced.

Gwen's smile widened.

"How was your meeting?" he asked.

"Cancelled."

"Why?"

"No explanation given."

"So, you're spreading the seeds of destruction by changing my day as well?"

Day 9 of 30: Relapse

Gwen didn't want to call Jeremy. She just found herself thinking about him as she drove home; imagining driving to his house to talk it out. It needed to be raining for the proper drama, of course. Her hair would be wet, but still pretty somehow. She'd be crying, but prettily, not the way she always did.

It would be emotional and passionate and everything would be resolved by the time the rain cleared. It would be perfect if she could just get every little detail right.

Eighteen months of dating off and on. She wasn't half as interested in him as a person as in the drama of a sometimes-almost boyfriend.

Day 7 of 30: First Date Waitress

Gwen was wrapping up her bachelor's in social work, nearly on schedule. She waited tables at a sports bar to meet the little extra bills that always popped up. It was not a First Date Venue, but they had specials on pitchers of light beer, which was apparently enough for the blond-haired/blue-eyed specimen seated before her to bring his over-dressed date on down.

She hated when first dates came in. Either the girl was so shocked at their destination the boy would overcompensate by focusing on the waitress or they'd be so wrapped up in learning inconsequential details that they couldn't order their drinks.

She knew she'd been that girl. That made it worse. But people-watching was research. She always liked a bit of extra research. She liked figuring out other people's stories.

The girl was still shocked that she was in this horrible place.

"We have a full bar selection," Gwen was offering. "Gin and tonic, vodka cranberry..."

The boy was slowly but steadily draining the pitcher.

"Gin and tonic sounds nice," the girl said, strangled by her own disappointments lodged in her larynx.

"I'll be right back," Gwen said, smiling. She was trying to build a rapport. It might not work, but the potential increase in tips was worth the effort.

Day 6 of 30: Brandy

Brandy was a morgue tech at Saint Esmeralda's Hospital. Brandy was used to dead bodies. There was a peace to them, most of the time. She had taken her certified nursing aide classes with Angie. They'd differed on their eventual goals, but had kept in touch. They lived in the same apartment complex by the hospital.

Another girl they knew, Marie, was working hospice care. Brandy and Angie both thought that was the more shredding option, emotionally speaking. Angie saw people who were fighting to live; Brandy saw them after they'd lost the fight; Marie was there while they were going down for the count.

Brandy was now locked in a room with dead coming back, dead rising, dead trying to live again. This was not real. This was some weird side effect of coffee, sleep deprivation, vending machine food.

This could not be real. Brandy did not live in that world. Brandy's world was neat, tidy, orderly.

Brandy's world was the room she was locking behind her as she went to get her lunch. She was not staying in there with her hallucinations.

Brandy grabbed her cell phone and started calling Angie.

"Angie, I'm having a psychotic break."

"You're too old for that."

"No. I saw...I saw bodies coming back."

"Yeah, us too."

"What?"

"And the power's out here. It's not at the hospital?"

"...you saw a dead body?"

"It came towards the balcony. Clock out. Come back to the apartment. Hell, come over to our place. We've got candles and flashlights and...strength in numbers?"

"You're crazy too."

"I think we all are right now, Bran."

Day 5 of 30: Bread

Gwen smelled like bread still.

Never mind all the showers, and these clothes never having been worn down to the sandwich shop. Somehow, the smell permeated her still.

She sat at the bar of the agreed-upon restaurant, nursing a coffee and trying to look 1: older than she was while 2: still adorable.

He wasn't late. He just wasn't early. She stirred more cream into her coffee. She'd acquired a taste for it black and sweet, but she needed something to do besides biting at her nails.

"Hey, there," he said from behind her.

She nearly knocked over her coffee. "Hi!"

"Hope you haven't been here long."

"Nope, just got here myself. Got a coffee to warm up." She wanted to say hi again. She wanted to hug him. She was just so relieved he'd shown up.

They were ushered off to a table now that both parties had arrived.

They lingered over the menu, trading middle names and random anecdotes.

"What do you do?" Gwen asked.

"I sell phones. And you?"

"I make sandwiches. We should work out a trade sometime." Gwen laughed at her joke. Jeremy didn't.

"So, what are you majoring in?" he said. Topic switch.

"Nothing yet. I want to do something to help people. I just don't know how. I volunteer different places. Mostly feeding people. Kinda ties in with the sandwiches that way."

He smiled.

She smiled back. The situation was slipping away from her. There was still something between them, but it wasn't quite sparking.

"I'm really glad I looked you up," Gwen heard herself saying. "I kinda...had a crush on you in class, and at the end of it I realized I didn't even know your last name so... you were gonna be gone. But I found you." He didn't say anything, just looked at her strangely. She bit her lip and looked back to her menu. "I...I'll have the chicken alfredo I think. I like chicken. Maybe the..." His hand was on hers. She looked up. "What're you going to have?" she asked.

"Chicken alfredo sounds great." He let go.

She smiled widely. "I'm usually...more articulate. I just...I want to...I wanted...I don't know."

He smiled again, and passed her the basket of bread. "Let's eat."

They ordered dual orders of chicken alfredo.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"Just turned twenty. You?"

"Eighteen until June."

"Plenty of time to decide how to help people."

"That's what I'm hoping. My whole life I've been precocious and full of potential. I just want to be sure I actually do something with all of that, instead of just waiting for life to happen at me."

Day 4 of 30: Angie

Matt went back to find a flashlight as thy waited for power to come back on. Angie stood at the doorway to their deck, looking at the suddenly dimmed apartment complex. She could still see. There was something outside, something getting closer. It was a person. It was mottled purple and gray and dark brown, like the trees and snow-covered ground it was leaving its bloodied footprints in. Its neck was at an odd angle. It was wearing a hospital gown.

She froze all of this in her mind as she did what came naturally to her: She screamed, dropped the phone, and fell to her knees.

Scream and fall, and the predator will think you're already dead.

Matt came out from the bedroom where he was pacing around. "What the hell is wrong with you this time?"

"I saw someone!" Angie cried. She deliberately turned her back on the sliding glass door to the balcony. She was not listening for the soft thud of a human body on the balcony. They were just elevated enough that no one would be able to break in easily. "I was just startled by something outside."

Matt's eyes widened as he saw it too. "Is that..."

"It can't be, it's not anything."

Matt wandered off with the flashlight into the kitchen.

"I got my flu shot! I should be fine! And Hep B!"

"I don't think this is flu."

Matt was sharpening their kitchen knives.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"It's...it's not real. This cannot be real. There is no such thing as zombies, Matt."

"I believe you. The guy you just screamed away from the deck doesn't believe you, but I do."

Angie glared at him. "That wasn't...that was just someone from the hospital just trying to mess with us."

"Oh?"

"Yeah."

Day 3 of 30: Plumage

She wore a black button-down shirt, dark rinse blue jeans, and black heels. This was her official Date Outfit. Serious, but not too much so. It was her most flattering outfit.

She curled her hair, burning her fingers and scalp as she always did. She almost immediately set to brushing out the curls. It was too much; she was trying too hard. She put on too much eye makeup, and dabbed it off with a tissue.

She put forth the effort, and then tried to clear it all away, disguise it to hide how vulnerable she was.

Day 2 of 30: Denial

Stage One: Denial

It was a mottled purple night, the January moon reflecting off the freshly fallen snow. It was breathtaking in an awful sort of way; too cold, too dark, too frightening for humans to really live like that. Angie liked it from the short, crucial distance. She could glimpse it from her living room. Seeing it from the bedroom window would scare her too much.

They were stocked up on the essentials of life: home-made soup, cookies, bread. They had leftovers stocked away in the freezer: ham and turkey and other assorted meats, labelled and put away in case they got snowed in. It wasn't likely, but it didn't hurt to be prepared.

Angie had baked and cooked since Thanksgiving, it felt like. She could sit back and feast. She didn't have to move at all. She was on her winter break between classes. She had the week off work from Saint Esmeralda's Hospital. She had little to no responsibilities for the first time in months. She could just relax and read.

Angie was glad for her apartment's gas fireplace, for its idea of comfort more than anything it truly provided. She was in her formal flannel pajamas, a quilt wrapped around her. She had a stack of paperbacks and magazines by her chair, cocoa and cookies on the coffee table a short reach away. She was going to spend as much time in her little nest as she could until classes started again.

Angie, a nursing student in her late twenties, was wishing she lived anywhere but the Midwestern United States. It got too cold. It got too hot in the summer. She was discontent with her life. She loved being in school, she loved her domesticated partner Matt, she loved the idea of being a registered nurse, a nurse practioner, of helping people. She was at the lowest point of her own energy levels, as far away from the peaks of the summer as her little apartment was in the dying winter.

Sometimes, it could be beautiful.

Matt knew what he wanted to do, and he was there. He was in Quality Assurance for a software company. Angie didn't entirely understand his job, but she knew he wore khakis and polos in the summer, and flannel-lined khakis and sweaters in the winter. His salary was almost three times what she was making as a nurse aide; she'd be making more when she became a nurse practitioner. He wasn't the macho "my wife can't make more money than I do" type; he was looking forward to her increased earning power. They weren't in lean times; it was just an extended period of transition.

She heard something outside. She'd opened the blinds to watch the snow fall. She wanted to see a suburban fox, but not up close. She liked animals, but not up close.

"Matt?" she said.

"No," he said reflexively from the couch.

"Matt," she continued anyway, "I heard something outside."

"Too bad."

"Matt, you're the alpha of this tribe."

"Pack," he corrected her.

She rolled her eyes to herself. "Anyway, go check."

"Why should I?"

"Because I don't feel like getting up."

"Poor baby."


The power cut out then, effectively ending their conversation. The fire and the moon through the blinds gave them some light to see by.

Angie carefully dog-eared the page of her book. She took a deep breath, and counted to ten.

"You think your mystery noise did that?" Matt asked her.

"I know it did," she lied.

"You don't know."

His disembodied voice started to gain a location, a body, as her eyes adjusted to the darkness.

There was the fire, there was the moon, there was the snow reflecting it all. There was Matt's silhouette against the blinds. He was looking out into the world.

Angie didn't want to do that. She didn't know what was going to look back; she didn't want to find out.

"We should call the complex," she said.

Matt sighed his long-suffering sigh. He was the voice of reason. "We don't have to; someone else would have already."

"What if everyone else is saying that?"

"They're not," he said.

He was steadfast and solid. He knew what reality contained, what could and could not happen. He knew that the sun would come up in the morning, and that he would have to go to work. He was her anchor, her tether to the world.

However, he was not the one who kept up the stockpile of first aid kits, food, and medication. That was all Angie and her paranoia of being cut off from the world. She was afraid of many things. She was going through school to become a registered nurse. She was learning all kinds of new things to be afraid of.

"What if the power doesn't come back on?"

"Madness and anarchy."

"So long as we're clear on that," Angie said.

Day 1 of 30: First Contact or How To Engineer a Meet Cute

It was Winter Break of Gwen's first year at college. She didn't have a major, or a boyfriend, or any idea what she was going to do with her life. Before the beginning of the semester, she'd had all of that and a job at a sandwich shop. She had the job still. Her main life goal was to eventually stop smelling of fresh bread. Everyone else was out of town, so business was slow at the sandwich shop.

She lived at home with her parents; she'd foolishly decided to go to the local college. It was a perfectly good school, but she wasn't breaking out of her comfort zone at all. Now that finals were done, she could focus on what really mattered. Looking for another job was going to be her summer project.

She was trying to reach out to new people; trying to make connections without actually making eye contact. She turned to online personals to see if anyone else was still in town; spotted the boy from her fall semester composition class that she'd sat behind. Jeremy. She'd liked him from the start. Well, close enough to it to gloss over any other distractions. He was cute, seemed sweet, and generally her type. She knew that he was a sophomore; that he'd gone south for the break, migrating to his ancestral home; that they probably weren't going to have any more classes together.

This could be her chance. This could be fate. This could be the funny, charming story to tell their children of How They Met.

She pinged him. They chatted for a bit on instant messenger. He asked her to describe herself. She said she was the girl with too much eye makeup who sat behind him. It was a very good description. Just like that, he knew far too much about her.

They set up a date for when he got back into town. They'd meet in the hip, trendy part of town, go out for dinner.

She had a Story, now she needed an Outfit.