A Day of Fullness | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: A Day of Fullness | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jacob Drollinger
06/05/09
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A Day of Fullness

Travis woke up on Friday with a dead feeling in his stomach. Was it a sense of foreboding, or was he physically ill? He couldn’t discern. He glanced at the toilet on his way out of the bathroom after showering. His gut told him that he might be forced to get down on his knees and give homage to the porcelain god at some point in the day, perhaps sooner rather than later. He decided that a cup of weak coffee was all he could handle today.
When he climbed into his Chevy Nova and turned the ignition, he noticed that as far as fuel was concerned, he was below “E”. He would have to stop at the station on the corner of 91st in order to make it to class. The QuickStop was never his first choice to stop for gas, but common sense told him that he would only be halfway to the next if he didn’t. The empty sensation in his stomach grew more forceful and vehement.
Travis pulled up to the pump slowly, and at that moment the engine stopped running. “Unbelievable,” he thought, and began to fill his tank with gasoline. He was fairly certain that he had sufficient funds in his account to fill up, so he did.
“Oh, no,” he yelled at himself inside his mind, suddenly remembering that he had forgotten his debit card on his nightstand. He prayed, “Lord, let me have enough cash in my wallet to cover this.” His wallet was full of cash. He pulled out two twenties and handed them to the clerk. “That was too close,” Travis thought, as he turned to leave, briefly noticing the young, slightly menacing looking man following him with his eyes.
Once Travis had left the store, the young man quickly approached him from behind and stuck a five inch blade in his back.
“Yo, dude. Let me have it,” the man whispered in his ear. With nothing else to do but get a knife in his lumbar spine, he slowly lifted his wallet from his pocket and handed it to the youth. “Thanks a lot, my man,” he growled at Travis as he ran across the side street to the left of the store.
Travis was now ready to vomit, and he wretched up the cup of java and what felt like a quart of bile right there in the parking lot. His gut was now completely empty, but the feeling of malaise had left him. “So, had it been a sense of foreboding that I had been feeling?” he wondered as he gazed around the parking lot to see if anyone had witnessed the crime. The lot, which had been full when he had been pumping his gas, was now totally barren.
The rest of that day and the next were uneventful, save for the necessary credit card cancellations and going to the DMV to replace his driver’s license. His stomach had completely recovered from the illness of Friday morning. He could not, however rid his mind of the terror which had filled him during the twenty seconds that the tip of that blade was at his back.
He woke up Sunday morning for church, had a hearty breakfast, and then drove to service at his church, which was just around the corner. The moment he entered the church, the sick feeling suddenly returned. Was he going to have to leave? He might have to hurl in the middle of the sermon. Travis entered the sanctuary, and immediately noticed a strange face sitting in the row just behind the one he normally sat in. He didn’t stare at it, but something about it looked familiar. He sat down in his usual spot.
At once, a voice behind him spoke softly, “Here ya’ go dude,” and a hand holding his wallet appeared in front of his face. “You think I can keep this, though?” the voice gently mumbled as Travis turned to see the face of the young man who had robbed him at knifepoint two days earlier. The chafed left hand of the sixteen year old was holding a Bible tract that Travis had kept in his wallet at all times. The boy’s eyes began to water up. “It’s got the name and address of this place on it,” the boy confessed gently.
“Oh yeah, and keep it right here,” said Travis, motioning at the young man’s heart, a heart which was now full.

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