A Dark and Stormy Man

It was a dark and stormy night. Except it wasn’t night, the sun was shining, and there was not a hint of a storm anywhere to be seen. But in the mind of Talbus Thurpreet, a five foot nothing, bespectacled, overweight troll of a man, it was very dark, very stormy, and it was very much, to him, night.

He had much on his mind that night, erm, day. His car had been stolen, which surprised him greatly since his car was a run-down mid-90s Mitsubishi that could have been described as rust-colored, since the existing paint was all but gone and the entire body was covered in a layer of rust. It also didn’t run very well; Talbus spent at least thirty minutes each morning just trying to get it to start, which added to the surprise of the theft that the culprit was somehow able to get it started this morning in the span of just a couple of minutes – from the time he walked out the door and saw his car with no thieves anywhere near it to the time it took him to realize that he had forgotten his keys, forgotten where he placed his keys, found his keys, remembered he had placed his wallet down somewhere while looking for his keys, found his wallet again, dropped his keys, picked them up, and walked out the door again. It was also notorious for making quite a sound, of which he heard none. He for a moment entertained the idea that a tow truck had been used for the robbery of his vehicle, though he heard nothing to support that theory – and thus dismissed it as… well, the only way he could describe how he dismissed it is “surprising”.

There was, of course, the forgetting and subsequent dropping of his keys, which again added to everything on his mind, but what was even more, well, surprising was that he did not notice that when he dropped his keys, somehow his house key fell off (the head of the key broke in half, separating it from his keyring), leading to him locking himself out of the house. Surprised at this bad fortune, he walked out to the curb where a squirrel decided to jump on his pants leg, imagine that it was some sort of edible substance, and take a large bite out of it, despite there being a layer of denim pants and a sock between the squirrel and his leg.

Off to the hospital, which was fortunately only a few blocks away from Talbus’s house, where he was informed that squirrel bites needed to be handled by his physician and was not considered an emergency, and his doctor was, surprisingly, not only a few blocks away, but a few dozen miles away.

Locked out of his home, without a car, and possibly infected with rabies or some other horrible squirrel-borne disease, Talbus naturally stumbled over a bit of debris on the pavement, fell, and broke his arm as he foolishly stuck it out and tried to catch himself.

“Surprising,” said the receptionist at the hospital. “I mean, injuring yourself enough to actually need a hospital visit just to get treatment for an animal bite. What kind of animal was it?”

“Squirrel,” Talbus muttered.

“Squirrel,” the receptionist echoed flatly, as if not convinced. “Okay, Mr. … um….”

Talbus carefully pronounced his last name. Thewer-preet. “Doesn’t really sound like it’s spelled. Blame my ancestors.”

“Okay, Mr. Thurp-tweet,” the receptionist replied, not really caring about getting his name right after all. Surprising. “Go back to Room 4 and someone will be with you in a moment.”

Talbus did just that, and discovered that in hospital-speak, “a moment” means “at least three hours”. He began to wonder if it was going to be too late to treat anything that was wrong with him. Also, he was in pain and no one seemed to care.

Surprising.