NaNoWriMo '06 - Day 4

I didn’t have a whole ot of time for writing today, but I got a little bit done, and managed to include a few ideas that had been bouncing around in my head all day.

I was a bit up on the word count yesterday, so even though I only got a few hundred words out today, I’m only behind by about a hundred words. I’ve got lots of time for writing tomorrow, so I fully ecpect to be well ahead of schedule by this time tomorrow night.

Once again, in case you missed it the first few times, this is raw and unedited (except for a once through with a spell checker).

Idle Hands (working title) Part 4

I left Emmett’s driveway as quietly as possible, given the horrendous roar Bertha was putting out since losing her bumper dodging a frightened coyote. Emmette’s mother was not someone you wanted to upset, particularly in the middle of the night. I had a gun, but that old woman packed a mean frying pan, and I was not going to temp fate if I could help it.

Emmett lived in a small corner of Idle called Little Rock. It was its own town, back in the day, but it was so small and relatively poor that it was eventually absorbed into Idle.

Local kids told stories about Little Rock, about seeing things at night that shouldn’t be there, about getting lost for hours in a patch of land only three square miles and with only a dozen or so real roads, all of which lead out eventually, things like that. Unfortunately, most of this stemmed from a long history of racism and class distinctions. Little Rock was founded by freed slaves who’d come up from the north and built a small mill and several farms. They were successful at it, too, but that was back in the days when a successful black man was a greater social outcast than a poor white man who was only poor because he was too lazy or stupid to do anything about it. It didn’t help that Little Rock was the only such community in the state at the time, an island of negroes in a state where almost everyone else called Ireland, England, or France their ancestral home.

Even today Maine remains roughly 94% white, the whitest state in the nation and, paradoxically, one of the most progressive, owing to the long and occasionally troublesome tradition of eastern liberalism. Idle itself was closer to 97% white, with Little Rock being home to most of the 0.6% of Idle’s population that was still black.

Emmett was a slightly different story. He and his mother came here from England a decade ago, and he settled in Little Rock specifically because of the history, and the rumors of strange goings on. The psychic reading act was just a front for his other activities, but I think he enjoyed it more than the rest, and Little Rock added to the mystique, as well as providing him with greater privacy.

My cell phone rang after a few minutes, the opening strains of Bach’s Concerto in D Minor filled the car. It made me angry every time I heard it, such a work of brilliance rendered inane by the cell phone’s tinny speaker, but it was better than any of the alternatives.