Introduction

About two months ago, I overheard a comment related to a boyfriend dumping his pregnant girlfriend in a university cafeteria. I started thinking about the personality of a man who would abandon a woman he had impregnated. Those thoughts resulted in me having a rather bland fantasy. The timeline of the fantasy covered about thirty minutes in a university cafeteria. It was about the interaction of an ex-boyfriend with his pregnant ex-girlfriend, and the interaction of an old man with the pregnant ex-girlfriend.

My fantasy took over my thoughts. One day, while I was working diligently on Part 4 of Opening Earth, I decided to turn the fantasy into a story. This story is the end result of the comment I heard turning into a daydream. Unfortunately, I haven’t done much work on Part 4 of Opening Earth.

I had planned to use UC San Diego as one of the locations in the story. Since I have never visited any of the universities in this area, I have no idea of the campus layout or of the size and relative locations of the universities’ facilities.

In a situation like this, I normally work from Map Quest, or a similar program, and photos of the interior of buildings to get my details close to reality. I was unable to locate suitable information to support any of the local universities, so I created a fictional university. Doing that stops all the emails from readers who would comment on the difference between my imagination and reality.

The main setting in the story is the imaginary university’s cafeteria. Other university facilities are either mentioned or inferred, but their locations and layout on the campus are not critical to the story.

My mental image of my fictional university’s cafeteria is a rectangular ground-floor room that has a large open area with a high ceiling and filled with four-foot square tables and chairs. When viewed from an entry door, the serving area and kitchen is to the rear of the far wall with its entryway at the center of the wall, which is the longest wall of the rectangular room. There are two entry doors with one at each end of the front wall, which is mostly floor-to-ceiling windows.

The story begins with the main character close to his death, but he is in flashback mode and the story begins about twenty years in the character’s past.

The story is rather short for me and consists of this introduction and seven chapters, a total of over forty five thousand words. I plan to post a chapter a week on Tuesdays. As always, I credit TeNderLoin’s editing of the story for improving the quality of my grammar and punctuation. As usual, I read the edited story and made a few changes before posting it, so I claim all of the errors you will find.

Edited By TeNderLoin