Null Pointer

Loquacious Lumberings

September - Around Town

September Crawl - 1,369 words

Do a 5-minute word sprint – 246 words.

When the call came over the radio for a disturbance in room 305 at the Glen Road Inn, Spider glanced at his partner. “Do you want me to take this one solo?”

Dan gave the offer a moment’s serious consideration, because he had no desire to set foot in the room where his former gang mates had held him and Hallie after kidnapping them prior to Julianna’s wedding. The disturbance was probably just a travel-stressed couple whose argument got too loud, but what if it wasn’t? What if someone took a swing, or, heaven forbid, had a weapon of some kind? There were at least two people involved which meant at least two officers needed to respond. Sure, he had bad memories, but they’d get worse if his partner got hurt because he didn’t face them. “No, I’m your partner. I’ve got your back.”

Spider nodded. Had Dan taken him up on the offer, he would have radioed for backup, just to be safe. Spider pulled into the parking lot of the inn and they got out. They could hear raised voices. Spider turned and saw the couple arguing by a car on the other side of the lot. “Guess they took it outside?” Spider guessed, assuming there was only one argument happening at the Inn tonight.

“Either way, I think we should break that up first,” Dan seconded.

Spider put on his friendliest cop look as they approached the couple. “Good evening. Is everything okay here?”

Choose One. Write 250 words – 7:35.

Mart sat down at the counter of Wimpy’s diner next to Grandpa Crimper. He dropped his notebook on the counter with a sigh.

“Usual?” Mike asked.

Mart nodded.

“Hey, thought you wanted to be a reporter,” Grandpa Crimper said.

“I did. But I wanted to report news, not gossip.”

Grandpa Crimper just laughed. “What’s the readership of that there paper you’re working for?”

Mart shrugged. “Maybe 500.”

“That’s generous.”

Mart shrugged again. “Look, it’s nothing against you or the store, but why should I care—why should anyone in this town that doesn’t actually work at the store care—that you’re getting modernized cash registers installed next month?”

“I’ll give you two reasons, young man. When are you most often in the store?”

“Saturday afternoon,” Mart said after a moment’s thought.

“You and everyone else in town. I can tell you – because businesses track things like average entrance time and time in the store before entering the queue for a register – that on a Saturday afternoon, there will be on average 20 people ahead of you at checkout. Our registers currently process transactions at, again, on average, one transaction every three minutes. We have five registers, so do a little quick math and you’ll expect to wait twelve minutes in line. The new registers will process a transaction in 1.8 minutes, saving you nearly five minutes in line per visit, which means, if you visit—as most of our residents do – at least three times a month – you’ll save fifteen minutes a month, or three hours a year.”

Do at least 2.

Free write for 5 minutes – 191 words.

Gummy Bears = G = 7 x20 = 140 – 3:39.

“Okay, ladies, what are we going to do with our afternoon?”

“We could go watch the new romcom with Orlando Bloom in it,” Honey suggested.

Trixie, practically bouncing where she stood as it was, shook her head. “I don’t know if I can sit still for that long. I want to go do something.”

“You probably would get kicked out, Miss Fidget,” Di teased. “We could go shopping. I wanted to see if the fall shades of that new indie nail polish were on the shelves here yet.”

“Shopping!” Trixie groaned.

“Well, if you don’t like our suggestions, what do you suggest we do?” Di asked her.

“Well, um, I was thinking maybe we’d go apple picking. The nice weather’s not going to last that much longer. We should make the most of it! We have all winter to shop and watch movies. Besides, Mart’ll eat a bushel all by himself. Moms will make apple pie, and you can make apple crisp. Maybe Mr. Maypenny would make cider donuts. He’d definitely press some into regular cider, and we could make cinnamon apples for the Junior-Senior High fundraiser next week.”

“Apple picking could be fun,” Di agreed.

Honey nodded. “Apple picking it is. Anywhere in particular you want to go, Trixie?”

“Any of the farms are fine.”

“I like the Samson farm best,” Di voted.

“Me too,” Honey admitted.

“Alright! Who’s driving?”

“You are, Miss Too-Much-Energy,” Di informed her. “Lead the way.”

“Hey, it’s not my fault they made us sit inside for three hours without a break just to take some stupid test.”

“That stupid test is going to get us into—or keep us out of—our dream schools.”

“That’s what makes it stupid,” Trixie replied. “Like a test it going to represent who I am and what I know about anything that matters, let alone everything. But that one number is going to mean ‘Trixie Belden’ to admissions departments everywhere.”

“Should I take that to mean you don’t think you did well?”

Do a three digit challenge: 267 words – 6:29.

It was weird coming back, Brian decided. It wasn’t that he hadn’t enjoyed his years at Sleepyside Junior-Senior High School. It was just weird to be back. He’d spent so much of his time in these halls focused on what was next: college, and then medical school, and then residency, and then career. When he’d graduated, he hadn’t looked back once as he pushed ahead down that path, going on to the next thing and then the next and then the next, until here he was, Doctor Brian Belden. His biology teacher had invited him back for an event the science department was hosting on STEM careers. Brian was a local in a STEM profession. They wanted him to speak to the students who might be considering similar paths, or who weren’t considering it yet, but possibly should be. Brian had agreed, not so much because he was certain he had anything of value to share with the high schoolers, but because the teacher had encouraged him and supported his quest for his dreams so well that Brian felt he owed it to the man to help out when asked. But there was something unnatural about walking through the hallways of the high school he’d graduated ten years ago. He didn’t always feel like he had perfected the art of adulting yet, but walking through these halls told him he’d outgrown them. The question was where that left him, if he had outgrown school but not yet grown into adulting. Definitely strange. Maybe he should have thought better of agreeing to this. Maybe he should have thought more about what he was going to say.

Quiz! Gaye. Sewing basket; doll house; Principal Stratton – 1.5/3 :(.

Do a fifty-headed hydra – 237 words.

Jim sighed. It wasn’t fair that he’d met two wonderful people who genuinely wanted to help him and he couldn’t take them up on it, at least not much of it. It wasn’t fair that he’d found two friends for the first time since his father died and now he had to leave them. It wasn’t fair that he was still disappointed to discover that fairness was an ideal, and like most ideals, sounded great when people talked about it but didn’t manifest itself in the real world more than once in a blue moon. He wished there was a blue moon. It would have made it easier to see in the predawn light. Fortunately, he was at home in the woods. Equally fortunate, he didn’t have a particular destination in mind, so he technically couldn’t get lost. He would go upstate, and see if he could get a job at one of the big camps. That meant going north, and he knew which way was north, so he’d go that way, with the clothes on his back, the couple hundred dollars Trixie had found in his great uncle’s mattress – the treasure always was in the living room, just like the blonde spitfire had insisted from the start – his christening mug and his uncle’s family Bible. It wasn’t fair that that was the grand total of his possessions. What had he done, at fifteen, to deserve this?

1,369 words.