Okay, so I wrote for forty minutes. Still, I do have 507 words. I think I have something here.
For about a minute, Josh Peters couldn’t believe his eyes. Across the street, through the blinds, he could see Shane Miller actually coming out into the sunlight.
Ever since he moved to the neighborhood when he started college, Josh got the impression that Shane was… well, off. Seeing him in the summer rays was almost an oxymoron. Regularly, Shane looked frail, almost anemic, and wasn’t really a sucker for conversation. A groundhog staying in its hole, in a sense.
What really caught Josh’s eye was the fact that Shane was smiling to himself as he pushed his pushed his lawnmower. From inside, Josh could hear the local kids giggling, playing, farting around.
It wasn’t just Shane. The whole neighborhood was like something straight out of The Twilight Zone. The thought was in the back of Josh’s mind, ever since he left the nest at twenty and got a job at Fulci’s Italian Restaurant. The job, surprisingly, paid well. Mr. Fulci was unusually generous.
Josh sipped on a can of Mountain Dew, and burped. He let go of the blind, and walked back to the living room recliner. The HDTV was set to the local news. In the past few months he’d been here, he was surprised at the incredibly low crime rate. In Savannah, his old hometown, there were multiple shootings every night, either for really trivial reasons or for no reason at all.
At the very least, he wouldn’t have to worry about being shot at random. Everyone in the vicinity of his house were too chipper for that.
Now, Shane Miller became one of those people. Damn Pollyannas, he thought.
Josh considered himself a realist and pragmatist. He had no real expectations, or higher ambitions. He never wanted to make a difference; he merely wanted to be average, and survive. Whatever worked best for him was the option that worked. He believed in the bottom line, with no frills.
Wondering what was on, he changed the channel. Genocyber was on. He remembered it from his days at the video store in his youth, renting anime every weekend to make himself look cool. He kicked that habit; it actually made him look like a total dork.
On screen, human entrails dangle from the ceiling of a dark hospital corridor, intercut with a nurse’s head falling off and rolling on the floor. Josh remembered watching this alone one night, when his parents were asleep. He didn’t sleep until morning.
There was a knocking on his door. Not wanting to disgust whoever it was with sounds of abject suffering and violence, he changed it back to the news.
Josh opened the door, and saw that it was Mrs. Moss. “Hello there, Josh!” Her voice was positively beaming.
“Oh, hi,” Josh replied.
“You look zoned out. Did you just wake up?”
Josh hesitated, and felt his messy scalp. “Uh, yeah, not too long ago. I was just watching TV,” he said. He looked over Mrs. Moss’s right shoulder, and he could see that Shane was still mowing. Still smiling.