Cornered

Russell sat down and looked out over his work with a great deal of satisfaction. Well, he thought, this is one thing I can take off of my life’s To-Do list. He leaned back against the wall to let the experience take it’s natural course.

As time passed, Russell would pull out his notebook and scribble in some odd observation. He was what one might call a compulsive documenter. He was thirty-five years old and thus far, had filled two closets to the top with notebooks full of his experiential observations. In the last fifteen minutes he had written: Flies tend to avoid really, really wet paint but are indifferent to mostly dry paint; People are often reluctant to come into the house when you yell for them to do so from a back room; and red floors give me a headache.

Soon his cat Manfred entered the scene. Manfred was a large orange tabby that essentially waddled from one comfortable sleeping place to the next, only departing from this pattern to periodically seek out Russell in hopes of being fed.

Manfred took a few steps into the room and then stopped. Something wasn’t right. He sniffed the air and then looked down at the freshly painted floor. It was at this point that Manfred went completely insane and began jumping from the floor to the table then back to the floor and onto the sofa. As the red footprints began to spread, Russell wrote frantically in his notebook. There were lessons to be learned from this.

Eventually, the experience came to what Russell would call a successful conclusion. The floor had dried, as had the work of Manfred, and he left the corner he had painted himself into smiling at the wealth of knowledge he had gained.

Word count 299