1 hour 10 minutes 10 seconds of writing.
8 minutes 8 seconds of closure.
11 minutes and 11 seconds of editing.
First-line prompt: There was a little noise.
There was a little noise.
“Cecelia, holy shit, what did I just tell you! I said watch yourself! You okay?”
I thought to myself that if that wasn’t the loudest whisper I’d ever heard, it was definitely the quietest yell.
Vern, if that was his real name, reached for the lamp on the desk that was wobbling in a concerning way. My shoulder didn’t hurt all that much, but it easily spoke to me that it had collided with something that wasn’t expected. Vern’s eyes looked like they had seen something that wasn’t expected. Though still attractively blue, they weren’t as reassuring as they were when we had first met just last month. Back then, they were a warm blue. They welcomed my thoughts and listened to my lips. Now, they were wide with a bit of a twitch in the way they moved. They would eventually meet mine and try to reconnect a sense of comfort, but that twitch was hard to ignore.
“Are you sure you’ve got the handle on that end? Do you need to take a break?”
“I’m fine, don’t sweat it,” I managed to say as I took the final steps around the corner. “Here, here. Let’s set it down here.”
A low grunt grumbled out of my mouth as we set the large chest down. My shoulder now decided it was more important to flaunt its pain. I reached for my arm instinctively.
“Cecelia, if we’re not ready for this right now, there’s still time to back out and try again another time. We can regroup with the others, explain that something felt off. Trusting your gut comes first, you know. This kind of stuff happens all the time.”
Even now, in the midst of the robbery that he and his team had planned for months, tediously and without missing the finest details, he found a way to be reassuring. If I had been in his shoes, I would have been losing my collective shit. Internally, my resolve would have been scorched and charred, nerves frayed from one end to the next. Externally, my eyes would have been more than a bit wide. They would have been narrow with fury and scanning for my antagonist’s weak spot. There would have been hell to pay. I am not composed when a plan doesn’t come together.
“Cecelia, did you hear me? We can regroup if we need to.” He paused for a moment. Vern then reached for his earpiece, “Sharon. Sharon, are you there? Sharon, come in. We’ve got a -“
“No, Vern, I’m fine. Let’s keep going.” I finally replied. My mind was elsewhere.
Sharon’s voice crackled through our ears, “Say again. Sorry Vern, I didn’t catch that last part. What did you say?”
“Vern, I’m good. Let’s get this going. We’re running out of time,” I pleaded.
Vern looked at me a second longer before replying than he normally would. He’d normally reply as quick as his smile would appear. No smile came this time though, just a look of concern.
“Alright, just be careful, okay?” His look of concern was abated, but unresolved. He quietly moved back to his end of the trunk, and gripped tightly with both hands. He looked at me and gestured his head down, signaling me to assume the proper form and stance that I had studied over the last two weeks.
“Vern, what the fuck? What did you say?” Sharon’s voice chimed again in our ears.
“Sorry, Sharon, it’s fine. Nothing to worry about. False alarm.” he replied.
“Wait, what? What did you see? Is everything alright? New girl, what’s he talking about?”
“Hey, sorry, it was nothing. I thought I had seen something but it was just one of the streetlights in the window’s reflection. My bad.” I lied. Odd, I thought to myself, I hadn’t been able to lie this well in a long time.
As Vern and I continued to move down the long hallway, the trunk’s handles squeaked and its weight swayed side to side. It wasn’t uneasy, but it it felt determined to remain a nuisance. Like a child submitting to his car seat, but ready to create a painful trip to the grocery store, it waited.
“Cecelia, look at me.” Vern said.
He sounded like what I imagined a future husband would sound like around the breakfast table on a cool Sunday morning. One with breakfast and coffee at the dinette table, and a window open with the sound of a Chickadee dancing around the backyard. He would have been checking on his fantasy football team, and I would have been checking my emails, looking for a reply to my farmer’s market application submission.
I looked at Vern, and he gazed quietly back into me. After a few seconds, he slowed to a stop. He set the trunk down, and crouched low. I still held the trunk’s handle with my hands, gripped tight and nearly numb.
“Sharon, we’re done here. We’re taking the trunk back. It’s only been…” he paused a moment as he checked his watch. “Eight minutes. We have time to get it back to Mr. D’s office, re-route, make the exit and meet up with Red.”
“Holy fucking shit, Vern. What the fuck just happened? Talk to me, what’s going on?” Sharon was yelling now.
“Gut feeling is bad. Something isn’t right.” Vern said.
I set the trunk down reluctantly. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I had the same feeling as Vern. It was maybe the overall heist, but more likely something between Vern and I.
“Shit.” Sharon sounded defeated. “Well, get your asses out of there. New girl, be careful.”
Vern and I made our way back the way we came. We moved through the familiar end of the long hallway, around the corner and through the rest of the offices. Mr. D’s office was easy to differentiate from the others in this section of the building, not by any visual distinction though. But if I haven’t studied thirty different angles of Mr. D’s door one hundred times each over the last two weeks, then I was a crazy person in a 1920’s insane asylum. The door slid open quietly just as it it had before, but more awkwardly this time as we held this three hundred and sixty-seven pound, two-hundred and thirteen year old, wheel-less, and slightly creaky mahogany trunk.
“Hold on Cecelia. My side needs to be on the left.” Vern whispered.
“Oh, that’s right. Wait, are you sure?”
“Yes. This is the left side. Come this way.”
We dosey-doed around Mr. D’s office, making sure to reset the scene just as it was before the office had locked up, before the lights had gone out, and before the alarm system was interrupted. We dropped it into place and made one more scan of our surroundings before starting our exit strategy.
“Hold on, the card.” I stated, pointing at Mr. D’s window that overlooked Warren Blvd. and the distant city skyline. An unfocused mind could lose itself in that skyline’s fine details. The glitter of city lights in the late-evening darkness was a rare kind of beauty.
Vern gingerly walked across the room, picked the card from the window, and rubbed off a bit of the adhesive residue from the window. After looking at the card’s previous resting place from another angle, he rubbed a bit more.
“Wait, where’s the trunk?”
“Don’t worry about it, Red. Just drive.” Vern’s comforting voice had transitioned into weariness. It was in fact 3:00 am, things hadn’t gone according to months of planning, and he and I hadn’t exactly made the most of the team’s scheduled rest period the day before.
“Fucking shit.” Red didn’t really say this to Vern or me, more to herself than anything. “I told Sharon this felt like a shit show. She never listens to me though. Fuck.”
Red accelerated through the turn, knowing that there would be no other drivers on the road at this hour. She merged onto Warren and made note not to drive off too fast. God knows her Crosstrek had more than enough after-market parts to hit zero to sixty in less than four seconds.
“She isn’t going to be happy about this,” Red said.
“Sharon will understand. She’s been here before,” Vern said.
“Not Sharon, dip shit. Angel.”
“Oh. Yeah. Well, we’ll get to that when we get there.” Vern’s voice wavered a little bit, but quickly resumed composure.
His eyes met mine and silently plead to me for the first time since I met him.
Writing Under the Influence 