Late!

``Damn it, I'm late,'' Eustace thought to himself as he hurriedly powered on his laptop. It was rather late -- past midnight, in fact -- and he was starting to scramble for it. It was a promise that he had made, to write a story every day for the entire year, and so far he had been quite fastidious, meeting the deadline most of the time, cheating once or twice when he accidentally overran the daily time limit.

Those days were usually Saturdays, where he had evening rehearsals with the band that he was playing with. He could, in theory, write earlier in the day to avoid the whole miss-the-deadline problem, but day-time on Saturdays are sacred. They presented probably the only time in the entire week where he was at liberty with himself, being able to actually partake in his hobbies and other interests, away from the dreary work week that he had to deal with on all the other days. Sunday was different---it was a day of repentence, spent out at the church in the morning and with his cell group later on in the afternoon.

The machine took its time to boot up, which caused Eustace's scalp to prickle with an uncomfortable itch. It was one of those idiopathic things that would happen whenever he was feeling stressed or otherwise uncomfortable. He coolly rubbed his hands through his hair and scratched his scalp a little while looking at the laptop screen. It finally came online and he logged in quickly and pulled up his favourite text editor.

Staring at the empty screen, Eustace started typing:

``Damn it, I'm late,'' ...