Moonlight Sketches by Gerard Collins

Author:Gerard Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC029000, FIC000000
Publisher: Creative Book Publishing
Published: 2011-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Darkness and Darcy Knight

What if you knew the worst thing done?

Would you help or would you run?

If only you knew.

When he first saw the note, Darcy just stared at the cramped handwriting in the vain hope that it would disappear. Being a bit nearsighted, he donned his spectacles and read it again. But the words remained the same, their meaning beyond doubt.

As a first-year teacher, neither his training nor his experience had suggested what might be done in this situation. But something, clearly, had to be done. A student was asking for his help and he wasn’t about to abandon her.

It was late November, and he’d just finished teaching for the day. The sun was already waning in the sky, and he was anxious to start the journey back to the cabin where he was staying fifteen miles outside of town. His Grade Ten students were mostly eager. They’d been discussing To Kill A Mockingbird and many of them had declared it the best book they’d ever read, even though they’d never seen a mockingbird and didn’t understand why killing one was such a grievous offense. They didn’t have mockingbirds in Darwin, Newfoundland. Furthermore, it was only natural to shoot something if you happened to have a gun and it had made the mortal mistake of flying.

“It’s all right to kill ducks, aren’t it?” one boy had asked.

“Father shot two turrs last weekend. Some good too!” another one said.

Then came the inevitable question about why it was okay to kill some birds and not others.

“Because some are more precious than others.” He hoped that explanation would satisfy them. But they were keener than he’d given them credit for, a fact both gratifying and disturbing at once. After all, as a new teacher in a small town, he had hoped for a rich experience, something memorable and grand to tell his parents in Tennessee when he wrote them a letter on the weekend. Normally, he would have emailed them, but this strange little town didn’t have an Internet provider yet, despite the year being 1997. It might come eventually, but for now he decided it would simply be a new experience, like stepping back in time fifty years to a place where such amenities weren’t even dreamed of yet.

The sad fact was, Darwin showed signs of regression, rather than progress. There used to be a gas station and even a small Drug Mart, he was told, but both had been boarded up a couple of years after the cod moratorium. It was a minor inconvenience having to remember to top up the tank almost every time he was out on the highway, but he’d adapted quickly. He was constantly amazed at what, with a little familiarity, could be considered normal.

When he’d asked at the rental office whether there would be phone service, the manager’s wife just laughed. “Not unless you have two other people to go in on a party line with you.”

“Then Internet service must be out of the question.

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