Prompt Added difficulty (because the people who gave me this prompt wanted to make it extra challenging):Until he is just a torso typing up his memoir, with their mind, with slowly disappearing fingers, end it on a half a word, no punctuation.
Several years ago, Cory lost his keys. He searched his entire apartment looking for them and he couldn’t find them. He called everywhere he had been the day before and no one had turned in lost keys. After waiting for a week, he finally gave up and went to a locksmith to have new car keys made and called his landlord and paid the fees for replacement keys. It was an inconvenience for him, but it didn’t stop his ability to do things. Thankfully he had a bicycle and it was summer, so he just rode that to work until he caved and replaced them all.
He looked in the mirror and adjusted his baseball cap. His caramel and brown eyes stared back at him rung with sleep sacks under his eyes. He had a long night helping a buddy of his move from one apartment to another. He could feel the fatigue in his arms and legs from lifting couches and recliners and entertainment stands. He had gotten in late and woke early to get to work again. He grabbed his keys and his knuckles smacked into the shelf. He grumbled some words under his breath and then looked down. The bowl that his keys sat in was missing. He looked around to see if maybe he had moved it a few inches last night when he chucked in his keys, but there was no key bowl anywhere in sight. He grunted and slipped his keys into his left jeans pocket. He took one more look deciding that he was awake enough to deal with this day.
He arrived at work and plopped down heavily into his chair. One of his teammates leaned over and whispered “You look like shit, man. Rough night?” Too tired to say much else, he just grunted and nodded back him. “Hear ya” he said and turned back to his desk. He worked for a filing company that sat on a computer and checked filed complaints all day to see if they were valid. It was easy mindless work and he did it well. He booted up his computer and pulled up his emails to review first.
By the time the day was over, he had nearly recovered from his exhaustion and was ready to head home and relax. He had no plans for the night and he planned to keep it that way. He shut down his computer and started to head towards the elevator to head out to his car. As he did, he bumped into his coworker who was wandering around like they were searching for something on the floor. “Hey, you okay?” He asked as he shoved the person away from himself.
The man looked up in surprise and responded “Yeah, sorry. I didn’t mean to run into you. I just lost shoe.” As if to clarify his point, the man shook his foot with the missing shoe.
Equally surprised, Cory pointed down at the shoe-less foot and asked the man. “Why… I mean, how?”
The man began to fidget and looked sheepish. “The shoes get a bit warm so I take them off near the end of the day to air them out before I have to put them on and head out. Went to put them back on and only found the one. Been looking around everywhere for the other without luck.”
He shook his head and began to head to the elevator again. “Well, good luck I guess.” The man just went back to looking frantically for his shoe.
Once home, he tossed his keys on the shelf and walked into the kitchen to make himself some food. Being in the lazy mood still, he grabbed some leftover pizza out of the fridge and put it on a plate and microwaved it. He took his pizza out to the living room and plopped down on his recliner and put the foot rest up. As he leaned back he reached over for the remote off the couch arm rest, but it was missing. He looked around and couldn’t see it anywhere in sight. Putting the foot rest down he searched the entertainment stand and under the couch and chair and found nothing, save for some dropped food crumbs. He stood up and looked around one final time before resigning himself to his fated loss. He went into his bedroom and grabbed his laptop and dragged it out to his living room where he propped it on his lap in the recliner and booted it up. He ate his pizza while he typed away on a word processor.
‘Things Lost. The List of Things Gone Missing To the Void.
- My key chain and all keys.
- My Key bowl.
- Coworker’s Shoe.
- My TV remote.
- My mind?’
He saved the document with the name ‘ThingsLost’ and closed it out. He decided to just stream some shows from his laptop while he chowed down on the rest of his pizza. Missing remote be damned, he wasn’t letting that get in his way.
As the months passed, he noticed things go missing periodically from himself and others and said nothing but kept his list going on his laptop. He was over 70 items deep now and started to write notes infrequently as well. There was an influx of people who started to just disappear and loved ones were on the news talking about them. He added each of their names to the list and each time a person went missing he wrote a note to a loved one in his document. Just in case he became the next thing lost, he wanted to be sure to leave behind something his family could have of his, besides his second hand recliner and cheap furniture. He didn’t own much and kept little. This was what he could leave them. A collection of his thoughts as things around him seemed to disappear.
The weirdest part of all this was everyone else. The rest of the people who were losing things didn’t act like this was unnatural. It was perhaps because they were used to misplacing items and finding them later, but Cory never did that. It was the best part of not owning a lot of things, you always knew where the items you had were. But he had noticed everyone else react to the lost things. The man at work who lost a shoe now sported brand new loafers. The woman down the street now had a new hat. Another woman at work had lost her lucky scarf and was now wearing a new one each day. His boss had a new fall jacket after asking around about his missing one. But no one was connecting these things as a bigger picture. No one, except Cory.
After another day at the office, he plopped down in his recliner again and began to recount the things lost he had observed. He didn’t feel like doing a lot of typing on this particular night, so he pulled up the dictation feature on his laptop and began to recite to his laptop’s microphone his thoughts on the things lost. The document was turning into a sort of frightening memoir that morphed missing items into love letters to friends and families to a memoir of himself. It was a living document that evolved as the things kept disappearing and then people. While reciting the story about how he got his job, he began to feel a little sick. It felt like his stomach had turned to mush and his head was spinning. He continued to recite even as he looked down and saw that he was disappearing. “The day that I met Richard, I knew he would be a tough son of a bitch to work for, but a fair one. He had a firm handshake and knew how to make you feel welcome or unwelcome with a glance. I shook his hand as he asked me if I knew the particulars of the job and ushered me into the chair across from his desk. We talked a little about the job and a lot about fishing and baseball. As it turns out, he played on a competing team for the local inter-murals I played for the season befo …
…The End