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August Gamble - Linda Hall
© Evangel Publishers It was hot—that torrid kind of August heat that threatens to suck the planet of its very life. That torrid kind of August heat that no one believes could happen in Canada. Not even the merest whisper of a cloud hung anywhere in the pallid sky. Trees stood like paper props left too long on an elementary school stage. No breeze rustled the limp leaves. It was the kind of day when everyone you meet says, “hot ’nuff for ya?” When Pris McNinn, therefore, left the cool, almost cold confines of Pfeiffer’s Independent Grocers where she’d been all day scanning groceries at checkstand number two, she was unprepared for the furnace blast which hit her square in the face. Just after 4:30 and the heat showed no sign of abating. “What a scorcher,” she said out loud shading her eyes. Despite the cardboard windscreen with the giant sunglasses, her 11 year old Ford would be as hot as an oven. Hot enough to fry an egg on the dashboard, she thought. The drive home would be a killer. Couldn’t afford air conditioning. Not on her salary. Not with three half-grown kids who demanded every penny, and an ex living somewhere up in Edmonton who refused to pay child support. The rank smell of refuse in the nearby dumpster assailed her nostrils. Why don’t they pick up this garbage once in a while she thought as she waved away the flies. She opened her car door, leaned across the searing vinyl and opened the passenger door, let some air through—as if that would help, the temperature up there somewhere in the high nineties. She smelled sour cigarette butts and decided it was high time she emptied her ash tray. Mr. Pfeiffer would kill her if she dumped the ashes in the parking lot, better take them over to the dumpster, she grumbled to herself. Pris was short, and lifting the heavy green dumpster lid was some feat. And oh, the smell. With one hand holding up the lid and with the other sprinkling her cigarette remains on the top of the knotted plastic bags full of coffee grounds, lunch leftovers, rotting cabbages, and mucky hamburger buns; something in the far back caught her eye—a thing familiar yet out of place. The tops of three spongy-looking grayish fingers pointed up between molding zucchinis and oranges. Probably one of those fake body parts you can buy at Halloween. Intrigued, she grabbed a stick from the ground and gently probed, nudging a slimy grapefruit and a paper filled cardboard box away from the fingers. And that is when she began to scream and scream and scream.
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