“Eddie,
we gotta go. Now.”
Through
my squinted eyes I could just make out a shape undulating as it moved across
the stripes of light that streamed in through the slatted blinds. I let out a
half-groan half-sigh that I had been perfecting over the past forty years and
ostriched my head back under the tangle of pillows and covers.
“Come
on. We don’t have time for this,” said the voice again. In an instant a draught
of cold air hit the parts of my body that my boxers and socks (yes, I sleep in
socks) weren’t covering as my sheets were yanked off me, presumably by the
owner of the nagging voice. This was the most convincing motivation I had been
given yet. I gave in and lifted my head from under the pillow to peek at my
bedside clock. It read 4:14am. This was the deadest time of night, a time when
it was just too late for mindless partiers to keep mindlessly partying and just
too early for mindless farmers to start mindlessly farming.
I sat
up, swung my legs off the bed and slipped my feet into my cotton slippers.
Standing up I took the opportunity to finally look at my assaulter. He was a
tallish man in his late-twenties or early-thirties, wore brown hair with brown
eyes and had a rather good-looking face that could have appeared on a magazine
cover. And he was a complete stranger.
My eyes
did not have the chance to observe the man for very long as all of a sudden a
gym bag- my very-seldom-used gym bag-
was thrust into my arms. I looked down into it and closed the zipper over the
socks and underwear and shirts that had just been stuffed into it. “’Kay, I got
all your stuff. Let’s go,” the man said as he started for the bedroom door.
The urge
to resist is not so strong when you’re standing in the cold of your bedroom in
nothing but your boxers and socks and cotton slippers as it is when you’re
snuggled comfortably in your warm and cozy bed. So all I said was “Alright,”
and I followed him out of the bedroom and down the stairs.
“You
remember the old cruiser, don’t you, Eddie?” the man said as he pointed to
perhaps the plainest and most boring car I ever saw, a gray ’04 Mercury
Marauder. I crossed the threshold of my house after him and as I did I let out
a cough, as the sharp February morning air filled my lungs. “Aha! Eddie!” the
man had taken this as an affirmative.
I opened
the passenger door of the boring car and flopped into the seat. It didn’t
matter at this point that my name wasn’t even Eddie- I just wanted to be
somewhere warm again. The man slammed shut his door, revved the engine, and we
sped off down the street, away from my cozy house, away from my cozy bed, and
straight into trouble.
_________________________________________
This post was based off of the following writing prompt: A friend rings your doorbell way too early in the morning to be ringing doorbells. You answer the door in your PJs, and the friend says, “Pack a bag quickly. I have to get out of here now and need you to come with me.” You are intrigued. Link: http://www.writersdigest.com/prompts/leaving-town-abruptly
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