Small Town Grievances 44: Wake up, ancient victim!
Your appliances are lousy with the Christmas dead.
Christmas has passed and we are all weary of visions. The river is black with holiday silt. The video stores are only renting videos on how to provide lifesaving care to the elderly, none of which feature any of the interesting techniques. It’s a strange time for town, when many believe the saloon door separating the living from the dead swings most wildly, when we dream dark dreams and ghosts tread through into our homes spoiling leftovers, rendering new appliances inoperable, altering the chemistry of medications governing friendliness. Father Jenkins is so busy sanctifying Christmas gifts that won’t turn on despite having the right batteries that he’s been forced to deputise an unsettling team from the Don’t You Do It! men’s support group he runs, one of whom always looks like he’s just walked through a spider web. Meanwhile, Mayor used his address at Christmas parade to announce that the money raised by privatising town’s barbershops will go towards developing a new kind of cigarette that will stay lit even when he drops it in the bath, which caused a ruckus.
Many happy returns: The new year means another anniversary for Fiona T.’s eternal garage sale, which enters its 31st year of constant operation on the lawn of what was once her home. It was a year of ups and downs for Fiona T., a major attraction for the neighbourhood despite everything on her tables looking much more depressing as soon as you’re out of your car: after briefly slipping into unconsciousness in the early autumn and requiring the community-funded health sentry camouflaged in the willows to make several tries at landing a shot in her chest with his adrenaline crossbow, she was able to convince a charitable browsing out-of-town family to buy a non-functioning device for heating a dozen baby bottles at once, which has been taking up space on her tables since the days Christ was still learning his times tables. We congratulate Fiona T. on her long struggle and pray this is the year she finds someone interested in her grey little plates.
Town hall reminds us that with most official facilities still closed for the holiday period, we need to remain vigilant of fraudulent workers impersonating town staff. Few need reminding of when Sheriff Karl raided the marriage registry a few Christmastimes ago following a tipoff that a team of extremely young-looking civil servants were refusing licenses “on the basis that one partner looked too wet and the other looked too dry, but wouldn’t say which was which”. If townspeople must conduct official business, they’re warned to look out for signs that something is amiss:
Having to enter the premises by stepping over completely smashed-in door;
No lighting except for single lit match that keeps burning worker’s fingers;
Workers wearing uniforms that resemble prison jumpsuits or Christmas pyjamas;
Workers tearing open your mail and reading it in front of you;
Workers giggling to each other while typing on keyboard that isn’t attached to anything;
Workers asking if you know how to get the TV working, and if so, would you put a video on for them;
Workers asking if you think they would be good at the job in real life, and would you be willing to write a letter about it;
Workers bearing identification badges featuring unusual titles or non-charter-approved curse words. (n.b: Lionel T. claims he recently did business at his home with a suspicious land auditor who signed his name “Mr Second Degree Double Murder” but other than using the bathroom for more than two hours his conduct was more than satisfactory.)
We’re also reminded that the police station remains full of sleeping gas while there are no officers around to watch over those prisoners not granted holiday clemency, and while care was taken to close as many windows as could be reached, the number of dogs wandering blind into the moat suggests we should try avoiding the building for now. Finally, while the firehouse is technically operational, as usual the firemen have gotten themselves worked up about the possibility of sliding down the high bronze pole too fast and jarring their tender ankles, so citizens are implored to only call in emergencies that can be hashed out over the phone.
Harry P. of the science centre is threatening access to the town telescope unless unprecedented holiday crowds sign a waiver agreeing that they won’t get disappointed when they realise it can’t be used to see what somebody looks like without any clothes on, or what their skeleton looks like without any flesh, or what’s going on behind the walls of a marital home no matter what transgressions the viewer suspects are occurring within. Harry P. maintains that the centre’s meagre budget is not enough to support any non-orthodox viewing experiences, but that if he gets enough interest he can try to find the coordinates of the comet that looks like a thrilled woman nursing a dog-faced baby, which is meant to be visiting the solar system sometime this decade. Just don’t ask him if the centre’s budget includes income from the “temporary” Wonders of Teenage Gambling exhibit that’s been running in the basement since the turn of the millennium unless you want him to start speaking at a volume that the phone struggles to faithfully convey.