When she started out, she always pulled her stitches too tight and she would end up barely able to move the needles. She got over that, in time, but she missed the precision of those tight stitches, the even rows, the way they clung together. Once she had let that go, eased off a bit, she found that she was dropping stitches and not even realizing it until rows later. There was probably a way to ease the dropped stitch back in, if she had more experience she would probably know how to do that. She didn’t, though, and instead she had to unravel row after row until she reached the one with the missed stitch and then she could slide the needle back through the stitches and start again. If she was one of those ‘think positive’ people, she could have probably come up with some sort of meaning for the dropped stitches, for the unravelling, but she just found it a pain in the ass.

It helped though, the knitting did, it kept her mind off everything else that was going on. She had tried losing herself in old TV shows – Friends, Full House, Seinfeld, but instead of sinking into their comfort she found herself yelling at the screen. Chandler and Monica had been amusing in the first place but now she just wanted them to grow the hell up, Uncle Jesse was still cute but she didn’t want to watch him try to cling to his youth, and when she found herself throwing a pillow at the screen when George was on, she had to turn it off. She couldn’t concentrate to read. She wanted to go to the gym but she didn’t dare leave the house in case he called – she didn’t want to risk having that conversation in public.

It was over. Her brain knew that. Her heart though? Her heart refused to accept it. Her brain played that last argument over and over again. It knew that when the door slammed behind him on Friday night, everything else shut with it. Her heart saw his clothes in the closet, his toothbrush in the stand, his shoes in the porch and it hoped. It hoped that this was just a dropped stitch, that they could unravel the rows of their argument and pick everything up again. Maybe they could knit everything tighter this time.

On Monday morning, she had an epically long scarf, a headache, and a meeting she couldn’t miss. With ibuprofen and with squared shoulders she headed into the office and walked the tightrope of her day. On the bus home, she pressed her forehead to the glass and let the streets become a blur as she daydreamed about him waiting for her when she got home. Brain be damned, her heart wanted him there, wanted to pretend none of this had happened. She told herself that if he was waiting at home, she wouldn’t bring up the fight. She could let it all drop, all those angry stitches, she would just sail in with a smile and make supper. It wouldn’t be hard, all could be well.

She ignored her brain and held that hope in her heart until she got inside and saw that his shoes were gone from the porch. She was going to have to learn how to weave Friday night in, and just keep knitting.

Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to watch three horror movies in a row when Nick was working an overnight. She wasn’t a kid, she didn’t have anything to prove, what the hell had she been thinking?

It seemed fine at 8 o’clock when Nick was heading out the door. This time of year, it was still a little light out at 8 and she had good snacks and a couple of beer, so horror movies seemed just the thing. Nick didn’t like horror at all so she usually saved them up to watch with her sister, but Ellen was out of town for a couple of weeks and it really didn’t seem like a big deal.

And it wasn’t, really. The first movie was about creatures who looked human until they decided to strike. That wasn’t very scary at all. A little gross, but not scary. The second was about a ghost and it was so over the top that she was hardly fazed. The third one, though, that hit her hard. It was about a woman who kept hearing things when she was home alone and ended with a killer slowly creeping up the stairs to her room and attacking her.

It had definitely been a bad choice for a woman staying alone in her house overnight. Ally couldn’t shake the image of the killer, dressed in black with his hood up, climbing the stairs to the victim’s bedroom.

She did all of her usual fall asleep tricks. She had a cup of tea, she read a romance novel, did some yoga and meditated. She had some music on at first, but she kept having this image of someone coming up the stair to her room and the music masking the sounds of their footsteps. So, she lay there in the quiet darkness and wished that she were one of those people who could fall asleep with the light on. The time on the clock crawled along. She saw 2AM, 3AM, and 3:38. She must have fallen asleep sometime after that because she sat up awake at 4:17 with her heart trying to escape her chest.

There was someone on the stairs. She could hear them creeping along, slow, sliding steps, like they were trying not to be heard. It was like the movie come to life. What the hell was she going to do?

She didn’t want to be like the woman in the movie, shaking in her bed, awaiting her doom. She took a deep breath, slid out from under the covers and practically jumped from her bedroom door to the top of the stairs. Her sudden appearance must have taken the intruder by surprise because he threw his hands up in the air, lost his balance and went tumbling down the stairs. She ran back to her room, locked the door and called the police.

She was talking to the 911 lady on her land line, so she decided to use her cell to text Nick and see if he could come home. She fired off a series of short texts and clutched the phone waiting for his reply while she listened closely to hear if the intruder was stirring.

She didn’t hear any movement. Instead, from downstairs, she heard the distinctive buzz and beep of Nick’s cell phone receiving text after text.

*******

Later, in the ambulance, she was sobbing on to Nick’s hand as she held it. She was begging him to be okay and promising never to watch horror movies again, when he squeezed her hand and spoke the first words he had said since his fall.

“Next time, I’ll call before I come home early.”

Annette felt that salads were entirely too much work.

It was bad enough when she was young and a salad was just iceberg lettuce and tomato with some bits of apple and cheese. Maybe some green pepper if things were getting fancy. Back then, you could pick all of those things up at the supermarket and be done with it.

Now, you had to go to the farm or the farmer’s market for some things and to the supermarket for others, and you had to have certain types of greens and crumbly cheese. You had to consider colours and how to cut the vegetables so they would look the best. Everything had to be organic or made by artisans. It was a big political statement and she didn’t even know where to begin.

Ms. Delaney’s administrative assistant had assigned specific foods to each person, and Annette knew that Jean would be carefully inspecting what arrived at the luncheon. She would probably be comparing it to a master list to see if it met her criteria. Most of it would probably fall far short.

If Annette had been left to her own devices, she would have brought bread to their get-together. Or, better yet, she would have convinced them to order something in. It was a bit too much like a neighbourhood party, this potluck foolishness. It would have been far better to have had something delivered, no political statements, no stress on the employees, no running around from place to place to source locally grown tomatoes. The mere idea that she had to ‘source’ food for a party was making her stomach turn over.

She couldn’t risk doing anything else though. She had to seem like a team player, like a ‘company woman’, she had to play along. Every day at Associated Insurance felt like a delicate balance and all it would take was one bad decision, one poor choice to tip her over into the unemployment line. When she thought about it, she wasn’t even sure that they still had unemployment lines, but there was still such a thing as getting fired and she wasn’t going to risk it.

That’s why she hated having to make a salad, too much risk. There was too much choosing, too much of a margin for error. There were too many ways for Jean to decide that Annette had fallen short. It might be the peppers, it might be the blue cheese, it might be that the carrot was grated too finely or that it had been grated it at all. Annette didn’t know what the salad trends were right now and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to know.

Why couldn’t she have been asked to bring the bread? Sure the choices would have been endless, but she could have just headed to the bakery and bought the fanciest looking one. As long as it was expensive, Jean wouldn’t have had anything to say about it, and Annette would have been off the hook.

She was firmly on the hook though, choosing different sized knives for different tasks, deciding which of her bowls looked the prettiest, triple rinsing the escarole. She was making this salad like her job depended on it because, for all she knew, it did.

I have passed her every day since January, she sits at the bus stop at the corner of Ruth and Michener. She wears a yellow coat and a greenish sort of scarf with a black hat. I always want to stop and see if she’s headed my way, maybe give her a ride so she doesn’t have to wait in the cold. I never do though.

You can’t just offer someone a ride in this day and age. They are bound to think that you are up to no good and I just don’t need that hassle. I know that sounds like an excuse not to help someone but I’ve been that girl on the bus stop and it’s kind of creepy when someone stops and offers you a ride. You know that they aren’t likely to be a serial killer or anything but you can’t quite shake that fear that they might be. You don’t want to be the stupid girl who got into a car with a stranger. Sure, it’s a bit different because we’re both women, but you never know, an awful lot of bad guys have turned out to be bad girls instead.

And that doesn’t even consider the risk to me, maybe she’s one of the bad girls and she’s just waiting her chance to take advantage of someone’s good nature. I don’t want to be that fool who picked up someone she didn’t even know and then ended up stranded in the middle of nowhere as the stranger drove off in her car. I know there are worse scenarios to paint, but let’s not even go there. I can’t even bear the thought of it.

I keep an eye our for her though, every day, as I go by. She always looks well. She’s been getting through her novel quickly. She always seems to have a snack. I probably don’t have to worry about her. She’s probably perfectly happy taking the bus. It’s not so bad, you know, the bus. You can just sit there and read while you get chauffeured to your destination. It beats driving a car – you can’t read and drive.

I wonder if she notices me, driving by every day. Does think of me as the woman in the blue Kia? Does she notice what I’m wearing, whether I have a snack? Is she wondering why I don’t stop and offer her a ride? Does it seem weird to her if I don’t drive by on a given day? Does it throw off her routine?

It’s on my mind, see, because this is two mornings in a row that she hasn’t been there. I didn’t think too much of it yesterday – everyone misses the occasional day at work or school – but two days in a row is pretty rare. I spent all day yesterday wondering about her, and I just caught myself thinking about her again as I made my tea during my break. I wonder if someone else decided to stop and pick her up? I probably don’t need to worry about her, right?

Today’s story a day prompt was to write a story in 604 words. I did it!

She stood at the side of the highway. The wind was whipping her hair into her face and sending her knee length coat flying out behind her like a cape. Rain was falling all around, but her eyes were afire, power dancing across her outstretched palms. She roared her fury and the sound cut through the wind and the rain and echoed off the rocks on either side of the road.
***

She had left home in sunshine, angling the Mazda through traffic as she made her way to the highway. She was a woman on a mission and that mission was to collect her mother from her quilting retreat on the Salmonier Line. It was a straightforward task and she had left in plenty of time, so there was nothing between her and her Mom but highway. She pressed her foot to the gas and bellowed along to the radio.

At first she thought that something had been spilled on the road ahead of her- a perfect circle of oil or paint that had somehow tumbled out of a truck and had splashed on the pavement. She slowed down in case it was slick, she didn’t want to hit something slippery at 100kms per hour.

Her caution saved her. This was no circle of paint in the road, it was a crater, a dent in the pavement deep enough to be filled with shadows. If she had hit that at her top speed…she shuddered to think of what would have happened. She pulled over onto the shoulder a little ways before the crater and put on her hazard lights. Hopefully, that would at least make people slow down a little as they approached.

Once she was safely parked, she called the police and then assured them that she would wait for them to arrive. She was probably going to be late for her mission, but hopefully her Mom was trying to quilt until the very last minute and wouldn’t notice. She didn’t want to send a text that would worry her mother.

She settled in to wait for the police, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror for any incoming traffic. When the mini-van came around the corner, she panicked at first and then calmed as the driver pulled in behind her. It was just starting to rain, so she grabbed her coat from the seat next to her and put it on as she got out to explain the situation to the other driver. She was almost back to the van when she heard the roar behind her, she looked into the other vehicle to see a woman so terrified that her face was all eyes and open mouth, her hand reaching towards the baby in the seat behind her.

She stopped walking towards the vehicle and turned on her heel to face the threat. A dragon was lumbering up the road towards her, flames spewing from its mouth. When she talked about it afterward, she wasn’t sure what made her try it but, given the presence of a dragon, magic seemed to be the order of the day.

Instead of running like a sensible person, she merely held her hands out in front of her and shouted ‘BEGONE.’ A sort of electrical charge shot from her palms and the dragon backed away. She shouted again, and he retreated further. She continued to walk forwards, driving the dragon further way from the woman and her baby. He was going to have to get through her and whatever the hell she was channelling through her hands before he got to that van.