So tonight, I went to the gym and I was so about to cop out after the elliptical when David Bowie saved my workout. The song in question, Mr. Bowie’s “Little Wonder”, is approximately six minutes long so it allowed me to get past that done-ellipticalling-want-to-go-home hump and into my circuit training. It practically catapulted me to the thigh-torture-machine and I was propelled through the rest of my workout and I left feeling smug indeed.
Not that I’m not ruining it all by drinking some cider, anyway.
Fun fact! I do not have (What’s The Story) Morning Glory on my laptop. Isn’t that bizarre? And, yes, I am straight up listening to Oasis and drinking cider and getting ready to watch Doctor Who. (JG,FE, this isn’t an episode I’m supposed to start, it’s Steve’s gig and we’re on it and it’s Friday night.) iTunes is informing me that Oasis is “indie rock”, which is awesome because it means that I was indie when I was, like, wee. Wikipedia informs me that it came out in 1995.
ARG. It is hours later. We have watched many Doctor Who’s, which means I am reviewing while drunk and also trusting in apple’s autocorrect, and…well, you know. These things happen. I feel slightly guilty for judging Steven Moffat on Season One of his gig. Seems slightly unfair.
Anyway. I have to post this while it’s still today and I have had just enough to drink to share the first part of a book I wrote with you. Seriously, I wrote a book. The heroine is called Ellie. I like that name. And this is a very first draft.
Ellie Fitzgerald was not a morning person. It was just as well, then, that her alarm started going off at around five pm every evening, leaving her a good five hours with which to get up, sometimes after the sun had gone down, and get ready to face her day. Or night, as the case may be. Either way, every day at five pm, her old-fashioned alarm clock would start ringing, reminding her that she’d made it through another night, avoided the heat of the day and that it was time to wake up to the world. Ellie loved it. It was a running joke that she was half-vampire in the Fitzgerald house, given that she could barely function before noon. They’d laughed when she told them she had a night job. They hadn’t laughed so much when she told them what it was.
So Ellie would wake up, more or less around five, eat either dinner or breakfast and putter around until about nine pm, leaving her plenty of time to finish whatever chores she had to do, spend some time with her cats and get ready for work. She was one of those fortunate creatures who worked somewhere with a fairly lax dress code so she would normally throw on a pair of jeans, a t-shirt (blank, of course, wouldn’t do to start any unnecessary conversations with the customers) and a pair of sneakers and head out to the streets. Being one of those people who was vocationally charmed, it seemed, she lived close enough to work to bike so she would hop on her trusty metal steed and pedal through the streets. It was late summer so the last of the sun had slipped under the horizon but the weather was still warm enough that Ellie had just picked up a backpack and left her jacket at home.
Arriving at a carefully nondescript two-story building in a part of town currently being redeveloped, she’d maneuver her bike down the oddly busy block, nodding at acquaintances as she went, and finally turn down an alleyway of the sort that nice girls shouldn’t be casually biking down. Ellie wasn’t worried, though. She knew exactly what went bump in the night. She also knew it was probably pretty nibbly and that she was the grocery store clerk, so to speak, and the bumps in the night knew they better be nice to her. Chaining her bike up under the small white sign that said “FBB Service Entrance”, she’d punch a code in the startlingly solid metal door and wait briefly while a series of disconcerting noises happened behind the door. Eventually, a small green light would set itself aglow and Ellie would shoo away the random hopefuls who took advantage of her pause to ask if they were open and head inside. And so Ellie’s days started, sometimes the only change being the selection of a jacket or not, and this one was no different.
“Busy night already, Ells,” a solid wall of man casually mentioned when she got into the break room to put her backpack away. Barney was technically the night watchman for the Bank, a misleading title, since none of them actually seemed to do what their job descriptions said they did. Barney was more of a friendly bouncer, making sure that everything moved through the center properly. Ellie herself had signed a contract giving her the title of night dispatcher but she was really more of a receptionist and the last wave of crowd control. At least that’s what the military-grade taser under her desk made her. Barney didn’t carry one, having his own set of tools.
“Oh?” Ellie moved over to a bank of lockers, the grey metal kind found in seemingly every break room in America, and started carefully checking her reflection to make sure there weren’t any bugs stuck around her helmet line.
“The phone was ringing off the hook when I got here at 8:45.” Barney laid down the book he was currently reading and grinned up at Ellie, “I just made sure it stayed off the hook until we open.”
e-m-j. 