Three Days Of Darkness
"Take that, Satan's minion!" cried Moe.
CHAPTER I
Three Days of Darkness!
“Good grief!” exclaimed Moe Hardee as he perused the latest Parish Post. He ran his fingers through his blonde hair and cast a worried glance toward his brother, Hank. “It says here that Padre Pio has prophesied Three Days of Darkness!”
“Gee,” remarked Hank, dark-haired and one year older than seventeen-year-old Moe, “that will sure put a crimp in our boating plans!” Hank and Moe were the sons of famous detective Denton Hardee, and they had been looking forward to a weekend expedition on Bartlett Bay with their Mayport High chums. “Read me the details.”
“Well, according to Padre Pio, an enormous cross in the sky will signal the imminence of three days of darkness, during which the sun will not shine and demons will run loose throughout the streets.”
“Holy moly!” reacted Hank, whose customary reserve and lack of impulsiveness had been rattled by the startling news.
Two Minutes For Holding
Things had just quieted down in the east wing when the welcome silence was pierced by another bellowing shout from Room 11. “Loo-eeeeze!!”
“Good heavens,” sighed Kaylee from behind the nursing station. She brushed a lock of hair from her eyes and replaced the phone in its cradle. “Doesn’t that man ever stop?”
“I can tell you’re new here,” drawled Janice as she checked items off of her clipboard. “I don’t even notice it anymore. It’s like the racket them geese make out on the patio. Drives you crazy at first, but then you get used to it.”
“I don’t know if I can ever get used to that. It makes me want to jump out of my skin every time he does it. Imagine having a man shout at you like that! Then again, I suppose poor Louise probably got so used to hearing it that she just tuned him out like you do.”
“Poor Louise?”
“Well, I’d say she was poor, having to put up with Mr. Francis until the day she died.”
Janice gave a hoarse laugh that died out in a series of coughs. “Ah, honey, you know what they say when you assume! Far as we know, nobody was putting up with Mr. Francis but himself.”
“What about Louise?”
“There’s never been any Louise that we know of. Old Mr. Francis was a bachelor, didn’t have no kids, lived alone and never said boo to the neighbors about any Louise until they started hearing him shouting the name over and over like he does here now.”
Kaylee furrowed her brow. “Well, that’s…odd.”
“And that ain’t the half of it! Wait ‘til you see him with his hockey players.”
Dynadormophis Up
What if people could bank, sell, and buy their sleep?
It doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with a sleeper or a dynamo, every service call on a Dynadorm unit leads to an angry or incoherent customer. That’s why there’s such a high turnover rate for us service techs, never mind the money. I don’t care what kind of debt you have hanging over your head, the first time you get assaulted by one of these people, no amount of compensation seems worth it. It’s not the physical trauma of it, it’s the terror of dealing with the unhinged. There’s nothing more dangerous than some sleep-deprived zombie who’s counting on you to get up and running again.
I’ve had all sorts of weapons pulled on me, dodged my share of thrown objects, and more than once I’ve been forced to threaten a client. Dynadormophis tells us not to in the handbook and every training session, but they know what goes on at the front line, and you do what you have to do. They’ll never admit it – that’s what keeps the lawyers off our backs – but every rookie soon learns that corporate doesn’t care what we do so long as the green keeps flowing. And they expect the green to keep flowing.
After all, it’s the service contracts that keep us in business. You can rent a Dynadorm fairly cheaply these days, relatively speaking, and outright buying one is within reach of some, but you’d be a fool to think that’s the extent of your investment if you expect the thing to keep working. I see the same scene over and over again. That first call usually comes sometime in the first or second year of operation, by which time the unit is well out of warranty and its owner has become financially, emotionally, and/or physically dependent on it. They can’t believe that the call is going to cost so much, swear up and down that nobody in sales ever made the cost/benefit ratio of a service contract clear to them, then finally stop stamping their feet and cursing long enough to accept our generous offer of applying seventy-five percent of their bill toward a long-term contract. After that, they’re pretty much hooked.
The Annotated Edward Cramer
An early influence?
When children express their boundless imagination in writing, the results can be bizarre. I am regularly reminded of this as a teacher of elementary-age students. It is my privilege to observe their literary development at a formative stage, when their novice attempts to emulate various styles sometimes merge with their limited background knowledge to surreal and unintentionally humorous effect.
What I try to remember when evaluating student narratives is how incredibly strange my own attempts at storytelling were at that age. As unusual as some of the student work I've encountered has been, none of it has surpassed some of my juvenile efforts in their breadth and depth of sheer weirdness. Take, for example, The Glass Eye, a macabre stab at humor that I wrote circa second or third grade. Its off-kilter flavor is apparent even in its byline, as I attributed the work to Edward Cramer.