Wednesday's Words on a Friday

On Wednesdays, Delores, from Under The Porch Light, has a word challenge meme which she calls “Words for Wednesday”.

She puts up a selection of six words which we then use in a short story, or a poem.

I’m hopeless at poetry so I always do a story.

It’s a fun challenge…why not join in?

This week's words are:

1. interference

2. plunging

3. magnanimous

4. gentry

5. brush

6. indelible

we also have:

1. impartial

2. thatched

3. glower

4. birdbath

5. inhumane

6. iridescent

What a selection!

Here is my story:

Mr Thomas Walford Jnr, ran his house with a tight rein. There was a strict schedule and no interference was allowed. Precision ruled his days. Things must happen in their proper time and place. Even small matters such as the cleaning of his hairbrush were fixed in time and space.

Every Saturday morning at precisely nine-thirty, Thomas showered and shampooed his hair. Therefore, at nine am, his brush must be washed, rinsed and left to dry in the sunshine. One simply must not brush freshly cleaned hair with a dirty brush.

He had been this way since that fateful holiday ten years ago, when he and Simon, both nineteen, had been para-sailing off a remote beach in Havana. High above the ocean, the wind had suddenly dropped and Thomas's last memory of that holiday was of plunging towards the water at great speed while Simon watched, horrified and probably terrified too, from the speed boat which had been towing him. 

Thomas had woken a week later, with fear indelibly printed upon his mind, to find Simon sitting beside his bed and his father, Thomas Snr, glowering at both of them from a chair on the other side of that bed. 

The para-sailing had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, and those must never happen again. Planning and routine, that was the way to go.
Upon arrival at the near-primitive hospital in the village Simon had taken Thomas to, Thomas Snr had been pleased to find that his son was being treated as impartially as the rest of the patients. Being a member of the gentry made no difference at all to the doctors and nurses there.

Once assured that Thomas had no physical injuries, his father had arranged for a private jet to fly him to the Boston hospital he had been born in, the very same where generations of Walfords had been born. As a thank you to the doctors and nurses, he had magnanimously paid for a new ward in the hospital and new thatched roofs for the small village of fishermen who had helped Simon bring Thomas to that tiny hospital. 

Now, ten years later, Thomas appeared fully recovered, but the change in his nature was great. Gone was the devil-may-care attitude that had seen him almost expelled from college several times. Gone was the happy-go-lucky fellow that had endeared him to his many friends. 

Each morning at eleven, his therapist arrived and they would talk about the past, the holiday, and what Thomas had planned for the week ahead. Thomas would reach for his neatly written diary and review the schedule therein. The therapist, Mr Butters, wanted him to try a day, even half a day, without a schedule. Leave a blank page in the diary and just do what came to mind.
At first, Thomas had thought him inhumane, cruel, for pushing him this way, but after ten years, he was beginning to think that maybe Mr Butters had a point. Sooner or later, something unexpected was bound to happen and if he, Thomas was unable to "go with the flow", he might very well be stuck here in this precisely run house forever. 

He sat this morning in his garden, near the birdbath watching the dragonflies flitting here and there on iridescent wings and decided the time had come. He must begin to move forward! 

With Mr Butters' help and his family too, Thomas would leave an entire day blank in next week's schedule.