Prompt #58
Don't be late
Good Monday to you!
I am a punctual person.
If you invite me to your house for dinner at 6:30 pm, you can count on your doorbell ringing at precisely 6:30 pm. Not a minute before or after. This imperative—that a person must arrive exactly on time—was drilled into my head by my father, a man who would yell things like, “WE ARE LEAVING IN FOUR MINUTES!” And then, a minute later, “WE ARE LEAVING IN THREE MINUTES!” And so on. If you were running, say, thirty seconds late, he’d yell, “WE GAVE OUR WORD WE’D BE THERE AT SIX-THIRTY!”
More than once, I have shown up at someone’s house at the appointed time to find they are in the shower or at the grocery store, not expecting me to REALLY be there for another hour.
Well, you get the point.
On the other hand, some people are chronically late. To everything. I’m not a big fan of that type of person.
I live very close to a very small airport. One time, for some long-forgotten reason, I was late for an airplane flight. (Blame my husband. I’m sure it was his fault! I am always punctual!) At the security checkpoint, there was one crazy long line, so I crashed my way to the very front and—starting to sweat—asked the man at the head of the line if I could please please please go ahead, as I was going to miss my flight! At that a TSA agent stepped forward and demanded I ask EVERY PERSON in line separately if I could cut in front of them. WHAT A MEANIE. Well, I did. I made eye contact with each person in the long line, and shouted maniacally “CAN I GO AHEAD OF YOU?” Thank God, each person called back “YES!” I threw my things down on the conveyer belt, dashed through the security apparatus, stood impatiently waiting for my suitcase to clear. Then I grabbed my bag and ran to my gate. By some miracle, my airplane hadn’t loaded yet. By now, I was dripping with sweat. But I had made it! And then, one by one, each person who had given me permission to go ahead of them strolled up beside me, calm as could be. Turned out, they were all on my same flight… Oh, man, so embarrassing.
Here’s the start of a Steven Milhauser story called “Late” in which he uses “the old workaround” for late people:
Because Valeria is always late, because I’d like to have dinner with her at seven, and because, if I ask her to meet me at the restaurant at seven, I might not have dinner until eight, I ask Valeria to meet me at the restaurant at six. This plan, I tell myself, is a bold and ingenious way of defeating lateness. Even if Valeria arrives forty-five minutes late for our six o’clock dinner, she will, without knowing it, be fifteen minutes early for our seven o’clock dinner.
You can read the rest of the story HERE if you haven’t already used up your Harper’s Magazine freebies for the month.
TODAY’S PROMPT
Write a story that has something to do with the concept of “late-ness." Here are some ideas to ponder:
Perhaps your story is about a character who is late for something, like yours truly at the airport.
Or your character can be waiting for someone who is late, as in the Milhauser story. (Yes, similar to last week’s prompt. That’s okay!)
Maybe your character is someone who can’t stand late people.
Or your character can’t stand people who insist on being punctual.
Maybe a baby’s due date is late, or it’s getting very late in the evening, or it’s just too late for a relationship to survive the latest problem…
Too late, too late—your character feels that it’s too late for something.
Let us sense the feelings in your story: anxiety, annoyance, fear, humor, dismissiveness—whatever it is, let that feeling come through.
As always, 400 words or less in the Comments section.
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He didn’t really blame her for being three and a half hours late the second time they met. Inclined to pay out a lot of slack, he recalled their first meeting, which at first she set for a Saturday noon, but seeing as she hadn’t factored the driving time from the Bay Area, she texted en route saying it would be more like afternoon, then later she texted again and said if she was really honest she’d better pull over and spend the night, the dog and all, and that actually tomorrow would be better and she would text again then. Now the second meeting she again said noon, and then en route texted to say, a few minutes before noon, she had a couple of stops in Chimicum and would be there shortly. It started to get dark and she wasn’t familiar with the layout so he went and waited for her in the parking lot. It was icy cold there in the wind, and he stood there checking for texts, fifteen minutes, half an hour after her stated arrival time and then he went back inside. It would be much better not to wait, he thought. Just live your life until she gets here, and you won’t waste time waiting, but that didn’t work. Not when she could be there any minute. He couldn’t concentrate because in his mind she was already there. But she wasn’t there, too. Like she was in two places at once, in his mind, and he was a little out of his mind, unable to decide being freezing cold and greeting her the way he would like, and the way he imagined she would like, or staying warm inside and not really knowing until it was too late she had arrived and was looking for him. So she never did text with a timely arrival time, and was very very late, but he didn’t care that much it was all so new and novel, you know, how could she do wrong, and then sitting next to the fire where they were both warm she injected that she didn’t do well with time and she was resolved to do better. Her insight impressed him, and he saw what a good person she was, and in that instant, too, saw she would never, never, be on time for anything for the rest of her life.