It was a blazing hot day in Norkas Hill. Those goddamned birds were shouting and shouting and shouting snippets of atonal jingles from bad commercials. Wind swept through the whole blasted town, bringing with it the rank odors of pestilence and decay. From far away, children could be heard choking on their own vomit and playing sadistic games on their unfortunate playmates. Young Man Higgins leapt out of his trailer home and landed on his front lawn. "Ho, ho!"he bellowed, as his trick leg snapped like a twig and sent a bone jutting out of his skin like bone jutting out of skin. "This life is not for weak of heart," prayed Higgins, "or for the proud of mind. This world is not for lunatics unless they are my kind. This land is not for you or me, nor anyone I know. This land is land and that is grand and I am G.I. Joe."
He chuckled at his own ingenuity as he dragged himself along the ground, smearing dirt and slimy insects across his new outfit. He desperately clawed his way to the old birch tree which grew alongside his old home, here in Norkas Hill. With lightning speed, he nimbly carved a wooden cane from the trunk of the tree with his razor-sharp incisors. Discarding the rest of the tree by hurling it at a young couple, (killing perhaps one of them if he was lucky,) he took hold of his mighty cane and used it to prop up his faulty young body. "The king is king but I am not," sang Higgins in his cracking baritone voice, "about to lose my head. They want me sick and in my sleep they'll tie me to my bed. They'll make up all these falsehoods and they'll make me miss my train. They'll be the feathers in my toes and I want some water. I want some water."
Archibald Higgins was an insane old man who lived in Kronas Hill Nursing Hospital for the Repulsively Agèd. On August 29, 1994, he awoke from a two-month coma to ask for some water. Harold Austerhaut, the new orderly, was playing solitaire with an old pinochle deck in the cafeteria, when he heard the muffled whining of old Mr. Higgins. He ran into the patient's room as fast as his gangly legs could carry him, but when he arrived, Mr. Higgins was already dead. Harold was fired immediately, and since Mr. Higgins had no living relatives, the entire incident was "swept under the rug," so to speak. No charges were brought against Harold, the Nursing Hospital, or the late Mr. Higgins.
Harold Austerhaut was in big trouble. Not just the kind of big trouble you get into and the worst that can happen is you have to pay a couple hundred bucks to some agency so that you could regain some sort of credit rating in this lousy town. Harold was in danger. Since 1987, he hadn't been able to hold steady employment in even the simplest and most mundane of positions. And now they wanted his house. Not that he had a house, mind you, but if he had had a house, it would've been had by the bank by now. But they wanted his house, which meant that he was in so much debt that he'd have to buy a house and give it to the bank in order to stop the bank from sending threatening letters, threatening phone calls, and threatening representatives with large black shiny briefcases to his tiny apartment in Sronka Springs, New York.
Actually, Harold wasn't in that much debt. In fact, he made the whole thing up about the bank wanting a house he didn't have. The whole Kronas Hill Nursing Hospital scandal had him a bit shaken up and he was overexaggerating and hyperventilating. Harold Austerhaut was flat broke, and that was no hyperventilation overexaggeration. He didn't even have the percentage of a dollar necessary to purchase a local newspaper so he could pore over the Want Ad section and make some phone calls to places that looked like they didn't care if you recently indirectly caused the death of an old man. Panic slowly twisted his small brain into a granny knot; he fidgeted and jerked until he got too tired and just lay there on the hard wooden floor staring at the pattern of the water stain marks on his ceiling. Night fell.
Harold fell asleep, his eyelids covering his plain brown eyes. Lying on the floor, Harold was seventy inches long. That morning he had been seventy-one inches tall, but carrying his one hundred forty pounds during the day had decreased his height by an inch. On the ground, he began to expand gradually. In the light of day, he would be described as unrepulsive, which, to his dismay, is not the same as attractive. His teeth were wonderfully white, yet imperfect. His nose stuck out of his face a little too far, and his chin stuck out a little too near. All in all, a body fished from the shallow end of the gene pool, but not an ugly one. He always wore his face with an air of friendly confusion, not unlike that of ex- President Ronald Reagan.
Harold sprang to his feet at the sound of the ringing telephone, and in doing so crashed his head into some shelves he'd been meaning to look at. Clutching his head in one hand and the base of his rotary phone in the other, he listened to the machine emit another obnoxiously loud ring. It was always during the second ring that Harold wished he'd owned an answering machine. He'd have it set for two rings and it would pick up and he'd be able to sit on the floor and listen to his own outgoing message.
"Click!", it would say, giving the originator of the call a sinking suspicion he wasn't dealing with a human being. Then, the initial two notes from "Everything Right is Wrong Again" by his favorite band They Might Be Giants would suddenly play over the line, just when Mr. Originator was expecting "Hello?" in a groggy Harold-Austerhaut-type voice. The tune would decrease in volume just in time to be drowned out by the perky prerecorded voice of Harold himself. "Hi," it would artificially greet Mr. Originator, "I'm not home right now." Mr. Originator would frown, knowing he had definitely been sucked into a conversation with an appliance. "If you leave your name, telephone number, message, and time of call at the sound of the beep, I'll get back to you as soon as inhumanly possible." Harold always said " inhumanly" when he meant "humanly," and he assumed he wouldn't change this common blunder for a stinking phone message. "Thank you for calling. Bye bye now," the machine would happily play back as the strains of music gave way abruptly to the 5000 Hz, forty-seven- second-long BEEP. Then Harold could actually sit back and screen Mr. Originator's call from the safety of his own wooden floor instead of facing the bad news personally. The phone rang a third time.
"Hello?" Harold said over the phone in a tone of voice which he hoped could either make him sound tired and sick, (if necessary, say, to discourage the queries of some annoying representative from Hypothetical & Annoying Research, Incorporated--you know, the people who want to find out something about someone in anyone's household who falls into a certain demographical area of interest,) or bright-tailed and bushy-eyed, (if it turned out that this was a prospective girlfriend, or prospective employer, or both.)
"Hi, Harry!", said a cheerfully upbeat youngish male voice, "How har hue?" It was Ernie Cox. Ernie had been Harold's friend since sophomore year in high school when they were trapped together in a mine shaft for a week due to an awful accident during a field trip to a horribly neglected patch of forest. And he was the only person who greeted Harold by saying Hi-Harry-How-Har-Hue. Ernie was a great friend, but Harold had often envisioned himself standing over a bloodied corpse, holding a still-beating heart in his hand, and yelling "Hi Hernie! Hi Hem Happy! How's Hure Heart?"
"Oh; hi, Ern," he said, in a tone of voice designed neither for the H&AR rep nor the girl-employer- friend. "I'm okay, I guess, except for this unemployed thingy. Other than that, I'm fine, except for the fact that I'm still madly in love with Sherry." Sherry had been his fiancée, but that was six years ago, and so Harold was well into the stage of loss that most psychological textbooks call PigHeaded-Stubbornness or General-Refusal-To-Get-The-Hell- On-With-Your-Life.
"Look;" blurted Ernie, in the same voice as earlier, (minus the "cheerfully"), and before Harold could even think to say, "Where? Where?", continued, "I thought we agreed that from now on, you would say 'Fine', and when you say that, I would understand it to mean, 'Fine, except for Sherry,' and if you ever wanted to tell me that you were no longer upset over her, you would say, 'Fine and also I've quit being a moron about Sherry.' You're like a broken record, for Pete's sake!"
Harold's inner anger considered making some grand statement, like, "You know, Ernie, if I'm a broken record, then on side TWO there's someone bellowing How Har Hue a thousand million times!" but the truth of Ernie's comment activated the logical centers of his brain, which promptly beat his inner anger to a bloody pulp. "Yeah, sorry, Ern. It's just that I get to thinking about my life on days like this. Anyway, why on earth did you call?" He peered across his dark room which screamed NIGHTTIME, looking instead for some information from the small and unreliable clock hanging on the far wall of his apartment. "I mean, it's kind of late."
The sound of Ernie's throat clearing crackled through the phone. "I'm sorry I called at three in the morning, but..." Harold absent-mindedly began dragging the phone toward the other end of his apartment. Although armed with the knowledge of THREE O'CLOCK and NIGHTTIME, he was still attempting to get verification from the little timepiece on the wall. "...interested in it as well." Something tugged at Harold's brain. "What? I wasn't paying attention." "I said, 'I just finished my shift at my new job, and since you need a paycheck, I figured you might be interested in it as well.'"
The clock was barely readable. The long slender arrow pointed at the 6, or rather at the VI. The short fat arrow, which should have been pointing exactly halfway between two numbers, seemed to point directly at the VIII. " Damn," commented Harold, who had to face the fact that whether the clock thought it was 7:30 or 8:30, neither of these times was anywhere near three o'clock, and as the saying goes, it was time to get a new clock. Ernie, who could not be expected to understand any of this, replied.
"What do you mean, 'Damn'?"
"Oh, sorry; nothing. A job?"
"Yes, a job. I just finished my first day's work at this delivery service. It's a new business; it doesn't pay too well, and the hours are annoying, but they still need another person, and as far as I know, you still need another employer. I wanted to tell you tonight so maybe you could go in tomorrow morning for an interview before the position is filled."
Harold fiddled with the hands on the clock, so that both hands pointed at the six, giving it the impression of being dead. "Oh, okay. Yeah, I will... thanks a lot." The thought occurred to him that he had missed a piece of information.
"Uh, where is it?"
"It's Kronas Delivery, over on Old Harelip street. It's a new place; it used to be Cycles Per Second Rent-A- Jalopy, remember?"
"Oh... oh, yeah. Didn't they go out of business because of some sex scandal or something?"
"No; there was a fire in their garage which wiped them out. Sex scandal?"
"Sorry. I'm just tired. Thanks a lot. I've gotta go."
"All right, see ya Harry."
"Ba-bye."
Harold returned the receiver to the base of the phone and went back to sleep on the exceedingly uncomfortable wooden floor. Five minutes after he fell asleep, the clock fell off the wall. Harold did not wake up.