LL is for Lonely Location

This freewriting challenge has been prompted by a photo I took and recently featured on my Instagram page.

I promised my followers I would post my piece on Later Writer, when written! Probably as a 20-minute freewrite.

One Brick Less

While being driven past this place, pausing for traffic lights or a crossroads, I noticed the missing brick at first. There are many possibilities but this is my favourite.

You see a red-bricked doorway with nothing behind it but the rest of the building…but there’s more to this than meets the eye. We needed to keep the children away from the road but answering the front door for deliveries and visitors was hazardous. Squashed child, frazzled mother, niggled father, to be avoided. So I removed the old door and bricked in the remaining space. Not very well, I grant you, but funds were low and I am not a builder. Nor a DIY expert. The mother was nagging, the kids were bragging, I had to act fast and our back door is now the main entrance to the home.

Then I hit on a problem. The following morning, while I munched my toast, Royal Mail came to the back door with a pile of post, just the once, and requested some kind of letter box be placed in the front of the house. It is a tight pavement out there so adding an extra item on the wall was both awkward and also beyond my expertise. The kids were screaming, the rain was teeming, and I needed to get down to the club. I’m short of tools, to be honest, not being a builder or a DIYer. One hammer, Two screwdrivers. I’d mixed the mortar for the brick infills in our only washing up bowl – must buy a new one – and smoothed it on with a fish slice – yep, we haven’t eaten any fried eggs since.

After work that day, I deduced there was only one way to ensure our bills, and more pleasurable correspondence, could be placed inside our home, tempting as it was to make that task impossible. The joy of no more bills! But the kids were needing their bedtime and their mother was doing my head in so I lumped the hammer at my new wall and thumped out one brick at eye level. I mention the height of that hole for a reason. Many passers-by and nosey neighbours – you know who you are – have commented on my new prison. Not accusing me of shutting away the kids or locking up their mother. No, they imagine me seeking peace in my own man cave with standing space only and a view of the world going by.

The post man is happy, the kids are safer, I’m at the club, and the mother? I’ve left her at home plastering the inside of the old door space and fixing a letter cage behind the hole. Bills will have their own protected space and the kids will learn to climb that wall one day.

If only I’d known their mother could Do It Herself.

More writing practice at ABC Alliterative Title Challenge.