Weekly Writing Challenge: Characters that Haunt You

When the alarm rang in the morning, Alice was immediately awake, she had a purpose and a job to do and there was no time to be lost. Joe was still sleeping, six o’clock in the morning was not yet his time. He could lay back and rest whilst Alice was busy with her morning work.

The children were also still sleeping and now Alice could make the most of the hour she had before the house was alive with stress and jobs that had to be done. The computer was ready and waiting and she switched it on. She knew where she was going, the page opened and she fed her Facebook co-ordinates into the page. She was in, online, and had a purpose. Her kitchen in the restaurant had fifty dishes ready cooked to be removed from the stoves and served to the waiting guests. Alice was an experienced restaurant manager in Cafeville and knew exactly how to plan everything to sell the most, get the most and this time a new 10 + stove would be the reward, but she had to plan the time. If she rose an hour later, the dishes would be spoiled and she would either have to ask other game colleagues to rescue the dishes or throw them away. One of the reasons why the alarm was always set for six, you never know.

There was a breath of relief when she saw that all was well in the restaurant. Alice’s café was ready to go. The seats were already fully occupied and her fifty portions of ratatouille were ready to be served. She could now pick up her new stove, cook more and quicker. It was a 50% speedy stove, cooking ten dishes at once in half of the time.

Now she left her café, after setting another 50 dishes for cooking and decided to see what was happening in the rest of the world.

“Oh no” she exclaimed when she saw that Patricia in the States was in despair because her boyfriend had left her for her best friend. Alice wrote a few words of reassurance and Patricia answered. Alice then saw that Jean was telling everyone how much she loved her sister and was showing a very pretty photo of a angel with a pink frame surrounding the love declaration.

“I must do that as well” thought Alice. Although she hated her sister and had not seen her for the past ten years, she decided it would look good on her Facebook wall. Alice was just going to look in on her farm to see if the crops were ready to be harvested when her daughter Sally was calling from the door.

“Mummy, we still havn’t got any milk for the cornflakes. You said you would buy some. What shall I eat for breakfast?”

This was annoying, just when Alice was thinking about planting some monster pumpkins in her fields on her farm. It would soon be Halloween and that would look so good.

“Don’t bother me with such trivial stuff Sally. You can see that I am busy. If you cannot eat the cornflakes, then have a slice of bread and jam.”

“But mummy, the bread is at least two days old: when are you buying some fresh bread?”

“I will have a look today, I should be able to fit it in some time this morning.”

Alice was sure there would be time. The dishes now cooking in her café would be ready by lunchtime and so she could fetch some supplies during the morning. In the afternoon she had no time. There was another load of cooking to do and her flowers in the restaurant had to be renewed. The water only lasted for twelve hours and the time was running short.

Joe was now up and in the bathroom.

“Alice I was wondering…..”

“I will go shopping this morning Joe, in the meanwhile you can make some coffee and have some chocolate to fill you up until lunch time. OK?”

Joe said nothing, he was used to Alice interest in her Facebook land and left the house. He could pop in at the local real café before arriving at work-

And so life continued in Alice’s household.

Lunchtime the family were all assembled for dinner at home. Alice served a meal of chicken nuggets with pasta and a cheese sauce. The local supermarket had a wonderful range of ready food, so she did not have to lose time cooking. After all there was another challenge on her farm, she had to plant two fields of beans until midnight and would be rewarded with a blue unicorn. She could imagine the jealousy on the computers of her gaming friends when they would see that.

An unforeseen problem occurred during the afternoon. The computer had a breakdown. Nothing would move, she had no connection to Internet. She called the provider and they apologised and promised they were working on it. Alice became nervous, her crops would fail meaning no blue unicorn and she was sure all her dishes in the restaurant would spoil. She tried the computer again, but no success.

When Joe came home from work she was a crumpled mass of disappointment and was crying.

“What’s up honey, something happened?”

“The computer server is out of action and I don’t know what to do.”

Joe lost the thread and something snapped.

“What about putting clean linen on the beds, cleaning the kitchen and tidying up the living room. It looks like a refugee camp. You are sick woman, pull yourself together and leave that stupid Facebook clan.”

Alice was devastated. How could she live without Facebook. She made a decision. She went to the bathroom and swallowed a whole packet of sleeping tablets.

She had a quiet funeral, just the family and on the gravestone was engraved

Rest in Peace Alice,

www facebook com.

Weekly Writing Challenge: Characters that Haunt You

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6 thoughts on “Weekly Writing Challenge: Characters that Haunt You”

Yikes!

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There is a frightening element of truth in this. Enjoyable story.

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Haha, more than a grain of truth in this I fear – well told Pat 🙂

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You know … there was an actual case where a women murdered her baby because she cried and made her mother stop playing farmville. You can’t make that stuff up. But you did.

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