“Mornin,’” she said quietly as she passed a co-worker. She left off the G. Perhaps not intentionally, but it was not present at the end of the word.
Hard N.
Also, if you had listened closely, which her co-worker had not, you could hear the slightest hint of a question in the word. It wasn’t purely a statement or observation. Not a full-blown “Mornin’?” (with or without the g), not by any means, but there was definitely a subtle query involved.
Perhaps not a question about whether or not it was, technically speaking, morning (the time between midnight and noon), but the realities surrounding time and our perception of it seemed challenged on some existential level.
If you had all the fancy gear the FBI and CIA use to record and examine people’s conversations, you’d soon hear there was even more than that.
Plenty more.
Slow it down and run it through filters that eliminate background noise and whatnot. Really listen. Pick it apart and you’ll hear pieces of “This is the morning of the first day of the rest of my life” and “Was that the last time I’ll see a sunrise?” Before you even reach the R you’ll hear “They proved crows have consciousness?” and traces of “I don’t even want to be here.”
Before the first N… “Fuck you Alan!”
“Please help me.”
“This isn’t how I imagined things.”
It’s all there.
Or at least, it was. For a few seconds. Sound waves traveling through the air in the lobby of 123 South Broad Street and then slowing down and eventually turning into thermal energy. Lost forever.
Monday mornings are like that.
As fate would have it, nine hours later, she passed the same man walking out.
“’Night.”