The Maybe I Should Write A Story Chronicles || Prologue.

The

Maybe I Should Write A Story

Chronicles

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Prologue

       John lie on his bed. It was a casual bed, sheets and blankets tucked in the edges with no noteworthy patterns or design. It had a wooden frame that creaked ever so slightly when John moved about. In his right hand he held a yellow notepad, half covered in notes and illustrations, and in his other he held a brown pen with blue ink.

   He looked up, knowing that there were no other people in the room, but had the constant need to reassure himself that nobody was watching him. His attention went back to his notepad after he found himself satisfied that he was alone. He flipped the page and continued to jot down the notes. He didn't have the best handwriting, but he knew that it would be good enough to serve his purpose.

   From outside his cell, John could hear the inaudible voices of three, maybe four, men talking in a loud tone gradually getting closer. He tore the two pages that he had been writing on and set them underneath his bedding. He slid the pen through the rings that kept the pages of the notepad together and slowly made his way towards the window, careful to make as little noise as possible. He slid his right hand between two of the iron bars that made up his window and dropped the pen and notepad outside, knowing that he could retrieve it at a later time. The voices were closer, and John could now hear the tap of their boots against the stone floor.

    He walked back over to the his bed and lifted the cover revealing the two pages that he had left there only moments ago. He grabbed the two and rolled them up into thin cylinders around two millimeters in diameter each. He began to slowly lift the mattress, still pinching the two rolled-up pieces of paper between two of his available fingers so that they wouldn't unroll. The bottom side of the yellow mattress revealed several small holes, appearing to be the work of bed bugs. John had made the holes less than a month ago with the pen he held in his left hand only minutes ago. He wriggled the first paper into one of the holes near the center of the mattress and the second one in another hole near the top-left corner of the mattress.

    It was a neat trick that he came up with four weeks ago. Every two weeks, the warden checked each cell for anything suspicious. Extra eating utensils were a common finding, and John had even heard rumors of a man who had hid knives behind a poster on the wall. The cafeteria provided no eating knives. This meant that the man had been in contact with a third party. Nobody knows for sure if the story was true. The way that John hid the papers in the holes was effective; during his last search, the warden simply assumed the mattress had become a home for bed bugs, and wanted nothing to do with them.

    John eased the mattress back down onto the bed's wooden frame. The voices were closer, and now audible, only a few feet away from his door. One of the voices he recognized as his inmate's.

    "Alright, best you get to bed, Will. It must be midnight by now, and you know how much the warden hates us staying up," Said a voice that John was sure belonged to Thomas, a man he met a few weeks back in the yard.

    John felt self-conscious and sat down on the edge of his bed, pretending to be deep in thought.

"Hey, you too, Tom," His inmate said to Thomas, confirming his earlier guess.

   The sound of a key entering and unlocking the lock on the door echoed throughout the hall before the metal door began to creak open.

"Good-night, Will." Said another voice, ending the conversation.

Will slumped into the cell, his shoulders aching from a long day's work in the yard. The door swung closed behind him and the click of the lock indicated that it was shut all the way. He slipped into his bed, not even bothering to change his clothes. John did the same. They lay in silence for about an hour, moonlight leaking through the window and onto the stone floor.

"Tonight?" John asked in a silent tone.

"Tonight."

The Maybe I Should Write A Story Chronicles will continue, but in a completely different form. I literally made this up as I went. If I can come up with a simple plot line, I'll use that and rewrite the beginning. Otherwise, I'll just build off of this one.

Let me know what you guys think.