I’m struggling under two deadlines. Well one deadline and one ultimatum.

The deadline is the 30th of the month when I have to have 50,000 words typed into my computer as some kind of cohesive idea collection which will be fashioned into something resembling a story.

The ultimatum is one which consists of vague threats to my person should I not meet this deadline, or keep on track to meet the deadline, neatly packaged into word totals easily computed by dividing 50,000 by 30 and multiplying by the date. So today is the 13th, meaning that I should have arrived at 21,666 words and I report in this evening with 21,740.

A sample:

“Sheila? Where are you?”, Joe asked from the center of the living room. He heard a muffled response but couldn’t quite figure out where it was coming from.

Sheila had crawled under the house after she convinced herself that she could hear rats chewing on the pipes. She had been down there for about an hour trying to lie as still as possible to pinpoint the source of the rasping that she heard over the television set. She heard Joe stomping around and wasn’t trying to tell him where she was, just trying to get him to shut up.

“Sheila, I kind of heard you, but where are you?”, asked Joe again.

Sheila took her flashlight and banged it against the floor of the living room. Joe felt it through his feet and figured out that someone was under the house, hopefully it was Sheila. He ran out the garage door and into the back yard where the cellar door was.

“Joe, I was trying to tell you to be quiet!”, Sheila yelled when she saw his face in the opening of the cellar door.

“What are you doing under the house woman?”, Joe shouted back.

Just then, the brown rat scampered past Sheila’s head, inches from her face and she screamed, “RAT!”

Joe could tell something dark was moving towards him when it crossed the beam of Sheila’s flashlight. He stood up and stood at the ready if the rat came out of the door. He had his metal toed work boots, ready for combat. “Flush it out honey!”, Joe yelled.

Sheila didn’t have much faith in Joe’s reflexes, but she swept her light, looking for the rodent. She caught a glimpse of it again, closer to the door and she picked up a rock and flung it over towards the rat. “Here it comes!”, she yelled.

Joe knew that rats liked to move along the edges of rooms and things so he figured he would block one side of the door and be ready to stomp on the other. The rat emerged in a flash of dirty, brown fur and tried to get past Joe’s defenses. The rat ran right into Joe’s left foot and then turned around to go the other direction. Joe stomped down with his right foot with all his might, missing the rat’s head and its fat body, but nailing its tail to the ground.

Now the rat was moving back and forth, trying to bite Joe but only finding vulcanized rubber and leather to gnaw on. Joe was just barely able to keep standing upright with his so planted and only kept his balance by leaning on the house. He was afraid that if he moved his left foot, he would shift his right, letting the rat escape. “Sheila! Get out here and whack this thing before he bites me!”, yelled Joe.

Sheila could see that she had a clear escape route through the door, so she scooted over the dirt and plastic sheeting as fast as she could. She slowed down and just poked her head out to survey the scene, Joe trying to keep the rat under his boot but leaning at a strange angle against the house. The rat was on the other side of Joe’s foot from the door, so she slid out. “Hold on honey!”, she yelled as she got to her feet and swung her aluminum flashlight down on the rat’s head.

“Nice swing, peach!”, Joe said, falling back onto the grass.

“I would have thought with those size fourteen boots you could have done more damage than that!”, Sheila shouted, rubbing any rat residue off her flashlight onto the grass.

“We’ve always been better as a team, you know that”, Joe said, smiling.

“I suppose that is true. At least I wasn’t crazy. I knew something was down here gnawing on things”, said Sheila.

“Maybe I’ll get a couple of traps. This might not be the only rat that likes the flavor of our house”, said Joe, “Hey, big news at the meeting today!”

“They approved the wooden sidewalks?”

“Nope, better.”

“They’re going to legalize prostitution? That would make that weird old fart in the Jackson Building happy!”, said Sheila.

“No, not that either. One more guess”, said Joe.

“We’re getting an Applebee’s?”, asked Sheila, clapping her hands together.

“How did you know?”

“One of the girls called me. It’s the big news in town, but I don’t really see why it’s such a huge deal. How many times a month can anyone afford to go to Applebee’s?”, she wondered.

“I guess they figure it will be locals and beach tourists stopping by, but it can only hurt the other restaurants in town. They’re never really crowded or anything.”, Joe replied.

“It’s mostly for the people driving through. People don’t want to eat somewhere that might give them indigestion before they start the drive back to the interstate. Who wants to drive from here to Olympia with the windows down because Grandpa Joe got a case of the wet farts from some hole in the wall restaurant?”, Sheila asked.