I threw the cushion that rested just inside the door down on the outdoor lounge chair. Sitting there bundled in my ratty throw, the coffee did its job of keeping the damp chill from overwhelming me. Still, I attempted, several times in fact, to read the first page of the seventh chapter. Depictions of a stereotypical Gothic setting had my eyes moving from the page to take in my surroundings again. Height nor railing felt like protection. Each moan or creak in the book had me looking for a source around me. I’d read the sentence about the slam of a door that had made the heroine scream three times now. Moving on, the eyes she then saw shine through the shadows in her world’s dark hallway made me slam my book closed.
If it hadn’t been three in the morning, I’d have picked up the phone and called my girlfriend Chloe. Not that she’d have minded, she’d been there for me before. This time, I felt she’d think me crazy. I could feel the straight jacket tighten around me, just considering calling her. Sure, once I explained to her what I thought I’d saw, she’d rationally talk me out of it. But then, I’d forever be the crazy friend, more unbalanced than before. She’s surely think I’d finally fallen off the deep end and worry endlessly about me. I hated to be checked up on. Sure, it was sweet at first. Yet, sometimes, even with the best of intentions, Chloe hovered over me like I was a broken person. A forever friend, someone I’d played with in preschool, she’d seen me through the deaths of both my parents, and the journey had changed our friendship.
Still having her own, she couldn’t understand what I had gone through or still went through. On the other hand, she could fear it enough to worry endlessly about me. I loved her for it, but couldn’t deal with it right now. My book fell from my hand. It startled me with the thud it made on the ground. I almost laughed at the ridiculousness of it. So, instead of reading, I decided to write.
Reading the time on the coffee pot, I poured myself a second cup at a little after four. Gulping at this point, grateful for tomorrow being Saturday, I grabbed my laptop from the desk and snuggled back into bed. As the computer came to life, I double-checked my memory for a detail to make me believe that I had indeed locked the sliding glass door.
After I typed in my password, I huffed as I gently tossed the laptop onto the mattress. Getting back out of bed, I walked through the still lit-up living room and yanked hard on the door. When it didn’t budge, I stomped back into the bedroom, realizing probably too late that people were trying to sleep under me. I gave my mental apologies to the floor.
Climbing into bed with a bounce from the force of my body, I curled my legs under me as I grabbed up the laptop. Clicking the correct file, I saw my current work in progress filled the screen. I’d left my main character, a big beautiful woman like myself, investigating the latest theft in her area. I wrote a lot of what I knew. Although, I often toned down, by quite a bit, my city’s news stories to fit into the genre of cozy. New York wasn’t known for mild crimes. Oh, it had them, but they didn’t get as much media time, if they got any at all, lest the paper become too heavy to handle. Sometimes the newspaper read more like a horror story, but it gave me ideas, places to start with each story.
Sometimes I just got a character from a criminal or a victim and went from there. Other times, a situation spoke to me. I’d dull the bloody and horrific into sweeter words of description. I’d set the crime in what I imagined a small north-eastern town to be like, somewhere in Pennsylvania or Ohio. Then, I’d go to town creating my own tale. My characters, my heroes especially, made me smile. Having never had a real relationship myself, I often stayed clear of romance plots. I alluded to them, the possibilities of one occurring, but never saw them through. Once I’d tried it, created a romance in a story that was what I imagined to be a love like that my parents shared. In the end, it had only depressed me. So, I’d not tried it again. It was hard enough to keep positive in this world, without adding to the sad plight.
The sound of my fingers tapping on the keys soothed me as it always had, but soon enough I found my fingers paused over the keys. I wiggled them just inches from the keyboard. Still my imagination refused to keep creating the scene. After staring at the white page for what was probably only a few seconds rather than a few minutes, I closed the file and opened a blank one. While I had never written a paranormal tale before, I started one now. I called it fiction even as I wrote from memory every second of what had happened to me tonight.