Foray into fiction

A friend of mine, SHB, thought I should try writing a book. Sure, I thought, why doesn't everyone? But faced with doing research or making s**t up, last night I chose the latter. ("And that has made all the difference.") Here's a first attempt:

Mr. Yamada awoke one Sunday morning with a most peculiar headache. As the first streaks of sunlight found their way into his room and directly to the tops of his toes, he tried to muster coherent memories of what had happened the night before. Nothing came to mind. He recalled cooking a lovely fish for dinner with a side of young carrots, not those apocryphal things called baby carrots but actual young carrots with green tops intact. And there was a newspaper story he was reading too, something about a boy who had found a wallet with 900 USD and decided to turn it in. The story had put him in a pleasant state of mind.

What happened after that, he thought. In the two minutes it had taken him to remember dinner and the news, his headache had not improved. In fact, what started as a dull pain on the right side of his head had now grown roots with steely hairs and was working its way toward the middle. A phone call, there had been a phone call last night, from Mrs. Ito, he recalled. Would he mind watching the two cats while she and Mr. Ito were away for a couple days? No, he wouldn’t mind. And, if it wasn’t too much trouble, would he mind coming down the street to their house to pick up the key at, say, 10:30 tonight? No, it wouldn’t be any trouble; in fact, he could come sooner. No, she hesitated, no sooner than 10:30, please.

Just as Mr. Yamada was hanging up the phone, Craig Bliss was stepping out of his car on Davidson Street. He was not happy. A knocking in the trunk had gotten louder over the last two minutes, and it was now, he thought, intolerable. As cars swerved over and to the left to avoid hitting him, he opened the passenger-side back door and pulled out a baseball bat, its finish long worn with nicks up and down its length. He proceeded to the back of the car and brought the bat down on the trunk – one, two, three, four times – until the knocking stopped; he got back in the car and drove away.

When Mr. Yamada arrived at the Itos’ house, two minutes before 10:30, he wondered if he had remembered the house number correctly. He was sure the house number was 2164, because 21 was how old his daughter would have been this year – he remembered thinking this when he came by the house two weeks ago – and ’64 was a good year, the year he finished graduate school. Mr. Yamada rang the bell again and strained to peer into the French door whose curtains were drawn. The house was dark inside, and if the Itos were home, they must have been in the back. Or maybe they had stepped out to pick some things up for their trip. It was a trip they were going on, right? He decided to wait. After all, he was early.