Misplaced (13) : Things are just vanishing. Maybe it’s the heat, or the chaos of the times, but even if you swear you put something somewhere, it might be gone. Maybe as quickly as you exit a room and return. Usually it’s only small things; sometimes you might hear a strange rattling just before something disappears, but once it’s gone, it’s gone. So far, it’s mostly things that aren’t too big, but recently there have been reports of cars just disappearing, too…
When Adrian rolled into work with his cup of straight espresso shots, he was expecting a normal work day. What he got was a continuation of the weird night he spent looking for drafts in his apartment. Only, this time, it wasn't drafts.
"How in the hell do you lose a jackhammer?!" His foreman barked at one of Adrian's coworkers. The man bellowing was all muscle, with muscle on his muscle, and a fat head with neck rolls that reminded Adrian of an angry dog. "I've had it with your excuses, Simon! Get the hell outta my yard!"
The man he was barking at (and subsequently spitting on) was an unscrupulous-looking fellow made of sun-dried wrinkles and bad decisions. He shriveled away from the foreman like the man was literally shouting him down, and his raspy, scrapey voice always made Adrian want to punch him in the face. "Swear to god in heaven, Boss! I laid it right here, then I grabbed my water, n' then it was gone! Oh — hey! Hey, Adrian!" And the nasty man waved his spindly little arm in the blonde's direction, "Didja see it?"
Adrian paused on his way to his project. "See what?" He asked as he snuffed out a half-smile.
"My jackhammer! When it disappeared!"
"Nope. Must've disappeared before I got here, Brayden." Not that he'd have fessed up if he did watch the thing vanish. He didn't trust men whose first and last names sounded like two first names, and he didn't trust anybody who wore suspenders. And he didn't socialize with anyone who might sabotage the few good things going with his current job. Helpfully, Adrian added, "Have you checked your a**?"
The foreman, unamused, jerked a thumb at the construction yard. "Get to work, Frost. I don't want to hear any more lip from you."
"Good to see you too, Gerald." Adrian flipped him a sarcastic salute on his way out to the yard.
The company had signed for this project several months ago, and work was slow — rehabbing a building from fire damage took a whole lot of time, and a whole lot of materials. Ripping out walls, replacing supports, new sheetrocking, new electrical, new insulation — they were basically building the place from the ground up, except they were following someone else's blueprint and didn't have much room for deviation.
Adrian's part was one of the more intensive tasks; owing to his experience in the cleaning industry, he was told to clean out the smoke and fire damage from the mostly intact basement. They needn't worry about replacing all the concrete and steel, but they needed the place s**c and span if they wanted to suck up all that fresh new insurance money.
Only problem was, while he was cleaning, he found a peculiar room with an even more peculiar smell. It was an unpleasant smell that he thought he'd left behind with his old job, and if he had even an ounce of conscience, he'd have reported it to the police. But the police would shut the place down as a crime scene and put them out of a job for however long that investigation took. So, starting last night, Adrian had quietly dipped into cleaning it of all those scraps of char and curiously unburnt wrappers.
But when he stopped in to resume decontaminating the place, he found that all of his chemicals were simply gone. Even the expensive ones. Especially the expensive ones. And he knew he didn't tell anyone about that little space, so… Was Simon telling the truth?
Word count: 611
