Fast Fiction Challenge 2010, Day 145: Dead Time
Title: Dead Time
Word: gypsy
Challenger: angelic_mystic
Length: 200 words exactly The waiting had begun to irritate him, which he knew was a bad sign.
His first watching brief after he'd left training, he'd been assigned surveillance on a junior civil servant. It had been a boring task, one he suspected had been given to him to inculcate the knowledge that intelligence gathering was a gradual, gentle process.
After tailing the woman for three days, he'd got impatient, made a mistake and been noticed, then confronted by a uniformed police officer for ‘stalking' her. He'd been punished for it, of course, spending the next year tailing, backtracking and watching lower security risks until senior personnel thought he'd learned his lesson.
He never did learn it; he merely discovered how to hide his frustration and irritation from others, and from himself.
That was decades ago, but he remembered the feeling so clearly as once again, the watching, and the long waiting had, for another day, so frustratingly, come to nothing.
He sighed, almost silently (he'd not lost that skill) and then caught his breath as the tiny subject of his last week's endeavours made itself known, and from his hide, he saw the rarest of pests, the lymantria dispar gypsy moth, arrive.
© Lee Barnett, 2010
This story is part of the 2010 Fast Fiction Challenge. A list of the first one hundred and twenty-five stories in the challenge can be found here.
The Fast Fiction Challenge - The Book; now available from lulu.com and, if you're in the US, via Amazon.com here; 180 of the best fast fiction challenge stories from the first three years' challenges... Fast Fiction Challenge 2010, Day 144: A Little Fluff Goes...
Word: gypsy
Challenger: angelic_mystic
Length: 200 words exactly The waiting had begun to irritate him, which he knew was a bad sign.
His first watching brief after he'd left training, he'd been assigned surveillance on a junior civil servant. It had been a boring task, one he suspected had been given to him to inculcate the knowledge that intelligence gathering was a gradual, gentle process.
After tailing the woman for three days, he'd got impatient, made a mistake and been noticed, then confronted by a uniformed police officer for ‘stalking' her. He'd been punished for it, of course, spending the next year tailing, backtracking and watching lower security risks until senior personnel thought he'd learned his lesson.
He never did learn it; he merely discovered how to hide his frustration and irritation from others, and from himself.
That was decades ago, but he remembered the feeling so clearly as once again, the watching, and the long waiting had, for another day, so frustratingly, come to nothing.
He sighed, almost silently (he'd not lost that skill) and then caught his breath as the tiny subject of his last week's endeavours made itself known, and from his hide, he saw the rarest of pests, the lymantria dispar gypsy moth, arrive.
© Lee Barnett, 2010
This story is part of the 2010 Fast Fiction Challenge. A list of the first one hundred and twenty-five stories in the challenge can be found here.
The Fast Fiction Challenge - The Book; now available from lulu.com and, if you're in the US, via Amazon.com here; 180 of the best fast fiction challenge stories from the first three years' challenges... Fast Fiction Challenge 2010, Day 144: A Little Fluff Goes...