Pernell Rogers – Writer

Hi all! I’ve started a new story after two months of racking my brain. I had to pull this story out, and there are still some fuzzy places, but it feels good to write again. This story is my first attempt at using first person, and I think that’s why it’s so hard to solidify. I run through very specific scenes in my head, but they’re not in sequence. They pop up out of nowhere, and it drives me nuts, but I’ll get a handle of it after a while.

In my last post, I mentioned the Lore podcast. What I’m discovering as I listen to his various stories is how we, as humans, fill in the blanks whenever we’re unsure, when there’s no evidence, and that’s what I did recently.

I was awakened by a rapid knock on a wall Sunday morning. I figured it was a woodpecker and stayed in bed. I heard it again, but this was much, much louder. I arose and started going around the second floor. Nothing.

Awake now, I went downstairs. While sipping coffee, I heard the rapid knocks again, and it was close. Then there was scratching and some pecking, and it came from the wall in the hallway. I placed my ear near and heard the scratching. An animal was stuck between the hallway wall and my laundry room! But what was it?

I called a company to remove it, but they couldn’t do it until Tuesday. That meant I had to live with that thing. I was unsure, so I filled in the blanks with scenarios I conjured up. Was it a bird, a roof rat, some other animal I don’t know about? How did it get in? Can it get out and enter my home? Being unsure brings out our fears, and many times moves us to react. As Sunday progressed, I could hear the thing moving toward the floor. There is a small opening in my laundry room where I almost lost my ferret one year. Could it escape and enter my home? I turned on the laundry room light and closed the door. It was trapped. Later, I saw fuzzy shadows pass in front of the light very fast. It was easy to remove some items I used to fill in the blanks. I was pretty sure it was a bird, but how big? What type of bird? A few hours later, the light in the laundry room was off, to my surprise. Did it break the bulb? The power to that light was still on. Could it spark a fire? That was on my mind as I went to bed that night. I’d filled in the blanks and examined possibilities right before sleeping.

My little story ends well. On Monday, someone came out, who had to call someone else. The three of us caught the unknown object. It was a small wren, which has skinny, sharp beaks. Somehow, it had entered my dryer vent outside and traveled down through the dryer tube until it reached the back of my dryer. Once there, it pecked a hole in the aluminum tube and started flying around my laundry room. The light was off because while flying around, and must have hit the light switch while trying to escape. It was released back into the wild, and I had to clean up my laundry room. It had knocked quite a few things over. Luckily, there wasn’t much bird poop.

I look back on that experience and watched how I filled in the blanks whenever I was unsure. Instead of exploring the possibility of the bird running into the light switch, I rushed to the conclusion that the bird somehow broke the light. I had filled in the blanks. A terrible assumption which led to me get less than 4 hours of sleep that night! It’s those fears, which may lead to unforeseen reactions, that make us human and keep us alive. Take care!

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