I already posted about the first time I wrote a story. This is about the second time I tried that. In my younger days I was enamored with Stephen King and his books. I loved them and read them all. I wanted to write like Stephen King and tell his kind of stories. I attempted to do that on several occasions but the tales never materialized the way I thought they would and I eventually abandoned them.

In 1987 when I was a young recruit in the Navy, I was attending a training school. One of our duties was standing a roving watch in the school house after hours. I often pulled the midwatch which was 0000-0400, or 12 AM – 4 AM for you civilian types. As I walked the dark halls in the wee hours of the morning there was one particular section of the building that really creeped me out. My vivid imagination created all kinds of mystical scenarios for those feelings and I thought I could convert that into a good short story. However, I never got around to writing it at the time.

About a year later I was all done with school and on my first ship, deployed in the Persian Gulf. One of my shipmates had this new fangled thing called a laptop. It was more like a lap cinder block because the thing was huge. It only had a monochrome screen and was very limited in what it could do but I thought it was pretty cool. Installed on the laptop was a word processor called Word Perfect. My shipmate let me use it and after learning the ins and outs of the word processor, I decided to turn my idea into a short story. So I spent nights settled in to the rocking and pitching of the ship as I banged out the story.

It’s not good but I thought I would put it up here if anybody wanted to read it and get a chuckle out of it. It wasn’t meant to be comedic but you take it where you can get it. Except for converting it to a PDF file, I haven’t changed a thing since I wrote it 32 years ago. Every misspelling and grammatical errors remain. It’s only 11 pages so it won’t take too much of your precious time if you care to peruse it.

Here is the link. It’s called Midwatch.

Share this shit y'all!