Grinding Teeth

         Grinding Teeth

          Horace B. True picked up a job as an imaging tech for a start-up firm in the city. He took thousands of photographs a day of legal documents with his fancy digital camera he was purchasing with deductions from his paycheck. There was a recent boom in this business all around the country where there were oil and natural gas deposits being drilled out of the virgin ground. He and his ilk served as middlemen for landmen who formerly had to "run title" by personally visiting the courthouses in the hopes of procuring rights from landowners to extract from the land. Here were copious books dating back to the turn of the century well over a hundred years ago. The older ones were awkwardly huge and weighed close to 30 pounds. Often, the courtrooms had been victims of fires in the past and many of these older books were destroyed. Also, many of the indexes were so sloppily written, it was virtually impossible at times to tell even a "4" from an "8."

            Every morning he woke, sometimes as early as 4 a.m. to go on a 300-mile round trip, but always by 6 to go at least 60 miles in a day, to go snap snap pictures of documents he didn't completely understand- warranty deeds, mineral deeds, mortgages, oil and gas releases, receipts, plat maps, affidavits, exhibits that sometimes went on for hundreds of pages, and then he uploaded them to a laptop, organized and numbered them (protocol), then he put them in order on a flash drive, according to what county, township and range to where he was assigned.

          The supervisor, who stayed in the office, was always on to him to work more diligently and meet the deadlines, even though he often worked around the clock for them, only breaking for a quick meal, then more work. He worried about falling asleep on the highway due to lack of sleep, but this didn't concern management, so the stress boiled to a pulsing headache and breaking out. Horace didn't understand the urgency of these oil companies to satisfy society's desire for oil when he was stuck in rush hour traffic, 3 hours to go 10 minutes, 1 person to a car, and the sunrise smothered in smog.

       Pulling books one day from the high shelves, he scooted a rolling platform ladder (which reminded him of a scaffold) around the vault, grateful not to be in the previous county where he'd been assigned to an abandoned third floor which housed ancient books covered in dust and cobwebs and where guano covered the floor.
       Stooping down to pull from the lowest shelf, a weighty book known as Deed # 5 came careening from the damaged, toppermost sliding rail and clunked into his skull. A strenuous thud and pop! All was white light, then blankness.

          Was this death by legal book? Or simply a coma?

         The court clerk ran in. Soon, the police. An ambulance screeched. The legal book went on trial for aggravated assault. As it sat before the judge, jury and plaintiff in the defendant's wooden chair, it was sentenced to 17 years in the state prison.
         Luckily for Horace B.True, he came to and regained his former composure, but now works part-time as a caddy at the Mingleton Country Club until he finishes his doctoral thesis on cervicogenic headaches. He spends his day navigating the course in his electric golf cart and plaid trousers. Unfortunately, for Ryan Petroman, he was fired the other day when he couldn't find any records contained in Deed # 5.