9:7

Caroline never did find out if her father had found the Malibu parked at the train station 150 miles away. She’d run out of gas and the $50 in her purse wasn’t going to go as far in the tank of that guzzler as it would at the bus station. She parked it at the train station to try and misdirect any pursuit and walked the two miles to the Greyhound. $45 later and she had a ticket heading east and hopefully far enough away from her old life that she’d never be found.

Slouched on the toilet seat in a grimy gas station washroom, she now wondered if anyone had ever even bothered to look. At least after he found the car, why would he have even bothered. All he cared about was his cherished animals and the endless blog of nature he that worked and slaved endlessly on. Her childhood had been an endless nightmare of one torture after another and she had made plenty sure he knew about it. All he cared about was getting back out there and heaping more indignities on her.

Well she we was done with that. She was never going back; she’d die first if that’s what it took. Caroline stood up and leaned in close to the mirror. “It was only a fucking rodent. It probably deserved to die,” she steeled herself. “You care about yourself and not the rest of the fucking world, just like the rest of those fuckers. Then you’ll be golden…”

She wiped her face with her cold hands and then took a deep breath.

“Let’s do this thing.”

9:8

Rowan couldn’t believe her eyes. It’s a friggin beaver. A beaver; just like the one Gareth had being going on about. She was sure he’d been pulling her leg with all the nonsense about a beaver and lemon tree. She’d been anticipating a giant guinea pig or something and a good laugh. When they’d got back to the apartment and the tree was gone she had thought he was just taking a joke too far.

Be he’d been pretty adamant hadn’t he? Still, a real live friggin beaver? Well, at least she thought it was still alive. The poor thing was bleeding pretty bad. Rowan stepped back into the apartment and grabbed an old set of sheets from the linen cupboard. The pale lilac sheets had come from her mother’s cast offs when she moved out and she hadn’t used them in ages. She dropped the folded top sheet on the hallway carpet and snapped out the fitted bottom sheet.

The sharp crack of the cotton sheet startled her as it broke the silence that seemed to have pervaded throughout her apartment. Should I wake Gareth up? Silently, Rowan decided to let sleeping boys lie and laid the sheet quietly out beside the bleeding beaver. Gingerly she rolled the limp mass over onto the sheet and quickly wrapped the still form up, trying to apply some pressure to where the blood seemed worst.

After she had the beaver tightly swaddled in the now blood-soaked sheet, Caroline grabbed the edges tightly and pulled. Dragging the heavy beaver backwards to the kitchen was more difficult than she’d thought it was be. This sure as shit weren’t no guinea pig, she thought to herself. One last heave dragged the sheets over the lip and onto the linoleum. Rowan looked up and sighed in relief as she saw there was hardly any blood on the dingy carpet. Well I guess mah damage deposit’s still safe, she thought giddily.

Stepping over the lilac-wrapped beaver, she retrieved the top sheet and some shears from a kitchen drawer. Time to make some bandages: beaver-style!

9:9

Gleaming blades of light piercing through windows and eyelids alike; an aching stiffness in the joints; the rumble and moan of the industrious ants of the colony and that thick and gooey muck that covered every lobe and crevasse in his tired brain: these were the things that morning brought.

He hated mornings. Some people awoke refreshed and reinvigorated and more power to them. But he just woke feeling worse than he had when he fell asleep; nothing in the long list of things mornings brought had any appeal, not the least of which was the fact that in always meant he had to do it all over again.

“It’s like a runners’ high,” they’d tell him. “Wait for it, soon you will be bouncing out of bed and discovering that the early morning can be your most productive time!” Apparently if one just grasped the morning by the horns and dove into it, it would become the shangri-la of productivity and bliss. So far all he’d found was that if you tried to grasp morning by the horns you quickly found yourself facedown in wettest and most disgusting corner of the corral.

“Try harder!” they’d say…

And it looked like this morning was not going to be the breakthrough that those ‘morning people’ kept promising. In fact, all indications were that this particular morning was going to be the poster child of of not-a-morning-person’s mornings; a veritable archetype of blech; the epitome of brain fuzzing, body aching, eye crusting, non sensical, pull the covers over your head and hide ante meridians.

“Gaargh! I hate mornings…”

9:12

Beaver Morphology and the 20th Century
Kinison, Henry & Masters, A
Published 2009, University of Adelaide Press

p.241
And so it can be conclusively proven that the underlying skeletal structure and subsequent odontological interactions can prevent any meaningful articulation or acts of aural expression from known species of Castor.

Likewise, when studying the more known structure of human maxillofacial deformations that include overjet and other maloclussions where the incisors project forward to such a degree that they are very prominent and obvious we have determined that the presence of a sigmatism is not in and of itself a linguistic barrier and should not be considered a barrier to language development (Fauchard, 1872).

p.497
Traditional and aboriginal tales that include incidents of Castor sp. engaged in any activity that can be subject to morphological analysis have been distinctly missing from their canons. Likewise the failure of any primitive or otherwise mythology to include incidents of the clinical transaction known as reciprocal altruism gads been noted extensively in the writings of Egermont in the late 60s (Alisoun ed. 1972).

It is curious that unlike an average of 97% of the common mammals found in the 60th percentile of human interaction indices (Hopewell and Hopewell, 1982) that Castor sp. is conspicuously absent from any records, whether aural or written, that include any anthropomorphological interaction.

p.626
Conspiracy theorists have long pondered the place of the beaver in human history and those that have dwelled too long on the topic have often been considered the most irrational of their ilk. Their evidence had heretofore consisted of disparate and disjointed cases that were based solely on a district lack of evidence to try and prove their theories.

Presented here we have outlined a logical and historical progression of the repression and negligent inattention to key indicators that have led to our current circumstances. It can no longer be tolerated that inadequate scientific foci and the ill-conceived dominant thought processes of the past two centuries be allowed to continue without intervention as determined by this current scholarship.

9:13

Friday the thirteenth. Shit. Shouldn’t someone send out a memo or something? There’s a reason we invented the internet after all.

Well, crap; now what do I do? I know better than to push things on a day like this. There are more things in heaven and earth and all that crap. Still, I can’t just sit here and wait, can I. Decisions, decisions, decisions…

I wonder if there’s a Starbucks anywhere around here? A pumpkin spice latte with extra cream…that’ll hit the spot. And maybe there will be a vegan or two I can torment. I gotta do something to take up some time. If I give it 18 hours or so it will be the 14th and past the witching hour; then I will have appeased whatever things Horatio’s philosophy forgot to consider that might be lurking and still meet my schedule.

In the meantime, and in between time, there’s a latte with my name on it out there somewhere.

9:14

What the hell was in that latte? Oh man my back is killing me, I am way to old to sleep in a park.

Jeez what a night; I remember… I remember… oh hell I don’t want to remember. Especially that.

Urrr, what time is it? And where the hell am I exactly? And what in God’s name is that? Is it…. a lemon tree?

9:16

“ding”

“ding”

“Ding!”

“Wha?”

“Good morning, delivery sir. Can you please sign here?”

“Wha… Ya, ok. Here.”

“Thank you sir. And enjoy the rest of your morning.

“Ya, whatever. You too…”

The label read:

Procrastinators Inc.
4323 Dunbourah Street

You order it; we ship it. Eventually.

“Awesome. It’s finally here…”