Small Town Grievances 36: No funny business with the mysterious blood trail
Small Town Grievances 36: No more funny business around the mysterious blood trail
Tensions are high among library folk ahead of tomorrow’s announcement about what will be done with the popular reading hole that afflicts the roof. Library members and associated perverts have already made their feelings well known: the library hole is the only point of natural light in the entire building by which to read, now that the windows are all afflicted by Satan Vine owing to negligent running of the nearby toddler’s garden. They say they can no longer feel their fingertips for being burned so frequently by their quick-burning reading matches, and it feels unnatural wearing headlamps in anything other than a mine.
The librarians have a greater stable of complaints. They are tired of the crankiness of the reading hole's long lines, and the veteran they’ve had to hire to police its ruckuses is unpredictable in his expressions of violence and demands use of the only working toilets as his office space. Nine months out of the year rain means every title on the shelves is swollen up big and obscene as a phone book, while the phone books themselves become too dangerous to use and must be dragged outside to be pecked apart by gulls.
On bright days the sun is enough to crisp those tender-necked members who get book-sleepy and drift off beneath its horrid eye. Even if there were funds for the first aid training modules covering those kinds of wounds, that money would need to go towards doing something about replacing the library computer, which some kids got stuck on the video of a guy losing his jaw at the Dirt Bike Olympics.Martin S. of the video store is once again in hot water with most of the town’s special interest groups after claiming that he can erase from the brain the memory of casual sins and agonies by careful application of a repurposed DVD laser. He says the fee is negotiable but should reflect the severity of the sin being addressed and should take into account each customer’s history of late fees. You can imagine the response this got from the Free Guild of CD, DVD and VHS-to-USB Transfer Specialists, whom Martin S. has bedevilled more than once already with his misuse of technology. They’ve already released one of their threatening little videos — a long spiel from masked men promising bloodshed alongside some largely convincing transition wipes, behaviour typical of the group since it splintered off from the less psycho business lobbies.
Mayor has won his motion to divert emergency money into upgrading the Hall of Famous Girlfriends, which has once again had its seasonal opening delayed due to concerns that the girlfriends have not been updated meaningfully for several years and the system dictating their animatronics is vulnerable to cyber attack from jealous towns beyond our knowing. Last year the girlfriends’ beautiful welcoming song was interrupted every ten minutes with a dishonourable message about our drinking water standards, and Mayor still carries with him the photo of the nasty upper-arm infection he got after being slashed in the photo booth, which the hospital told him was “the kind of thing you're only meant to get when you get stabbed in an outhouse”.
False alarm: Sheriff Karl put out a quiet word this morning saying that the search for the source of the mysterious blood trail continues, walking back earlier reports that they’d finally reached its end. The blood trail was discovered early yesterday morning, spattering down the old part of Main Street before curving off and running for what seems like the entire length and breadth of town, visiting most homes and businesses along the way. Sheriff Karl put the miscommunication down to some officers he had hunting for the trail’s end late into the night, who were evidently a little nervous with adventure and spooked by the after-dinner hour of their work, and hadn’t been sleeping well for the last week after seeing a training video about how to stop an out of control firehose.
Under these pressures they understandably became gunk-blind and were unable to distinguish one liquid from another upon the ground they walked, and were soon lost and disoriented. Leon R. of the depressing self-service car wash came out of his little sleeping shed to find them there, crosseyed in the moonlight, yelping quietly in one of the lonely bays and pulling the triggers of their unloaded service revolvers in celebration as they put their faces as close as possible to the stream of car-soap runoff that seems to flow from the business even during the no-business months.
Sheriff Karl says the officers will be placed on early bedtime duties as the search continues. In the meantime he advises us not to approach the blood trail or interact with the blood trail in any way, even if the blood trail leads close to our doorstep or across our freshly painted window sills. We are to keep our paces from it, no matter how much we feel it may bear us some message. We are not to dip a rag or piece of parchment in the blood trail for posterity in the unlikely chance it’s the blood of a famous hero or celebrity to be bartered with later amongst out-of-towners stopping for taffy. Treat it, he says, as we would any poisonous syrup encountered in the wild.
Does he really need to tell us this? Who among our neighbours has the time to worry about each new blood trail dirtying up their car port? Just another one of the world’s unknown spills, just another magic-eye puzzle god expects us to solve. There is too much already on our list of frets. The hospital is hiding another outbreak of Cheesecake Factory Syndrome, we are sure. The playground equipment at the little school melts in any weather above absolute zero, the children ride it slowly to the concrete below.
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