Character Sketch

7/1/20

Lucas Maxwell ran his hands through his shoulder length hair, single handly destroying the ponytail it had been wrestled into several hours earlier. He grinned and reflected upon an earlier phone call from his mother. Even at 27, the woman was still on his case about cutting his “overly long” hair.

He glared at his computer screen; as if it would make a difference in the error message that was displayed proudly in blue disappear.

Standing to stretch, he whacked his head with a loud THUNK on the ceiling fan. Giving the fan blades a withering look, he wandered in the general direction of the fridge, pondering what dinner would be.

He snorted. And shook his head, partially to get his hair out of his eyes, and partially at his lack of food preparation. “When was the last time I ate an actual dinner? Last Friday? Yeah, that was it,” he mumbled with a crooked grin. Be careful, a little voice in that back of his head. People will start to think yer crazy if ya start talkin’ to yerself.

Returning to his food scrounging, and after finding a rather moldy looking piece of fried chicken (which he laid aside for his garbage disposal-act-alike roommate), he unearthed a bottle of cherry coke. Checking the freshness date, and finding it to be sometime in 2005, he when off in search of a solid food substance.

Nearly an hour later of digging through a pile of cheetos, computer manuals and an EMT training book that he hadn’t cracked open for five years, our favorite computer geekling was open a newly bought, unopened box of cheese-its. He sat at the tiny kitchen table, shoved his work aside, and with his stomach cursing his acidic choice of food, Lucas dove into his dinner, remembering the times when he had actually given thought to his eating habits.

After regaining energy from the meager source of carbohydrates, he contemplated his sleeping patterns. Considering no one has actually put a brain cell to work on the idea of designing a bed for someone over 7 feet tall, I’ve been reduced to sleeping on this godforsaken excuse for a couch… I damn whoever it is that’s in charge of mattress design at Serta.

Lucas sighed and resigned himself to ripping apart the hard drive of his error-devoted computer.