Ben lifted his head from the pillow. He looked out the window into the steel gray light of early morning. His eyelids felt heavy and after looking into his mirror he confirmed that he looked like the nearest representation of death, in other words he looked like Joan Van Ark. Ben shook his head and as he walked to the bathroom he remembered a time when he could wake up and feel refreshed. That time was before he moved into the quaint hamlet of Briarberry
Ben had gotten tired of life in the big city. His job as a Bazooka Joe comic spellchecker kept him busy and provided for him quite a comfy living. Ben had a nice big apartment with nice big furniture and fancy art on the walls. The couch felt like you were falling into a dumpster full of marshmallows and the carpet pile was so lush and thick Ben needed to comb it when he lost change. He had friends and they went out and did cultured city-life type activities. Parks and picnics on lazy Sunday afternoons, opera and theater on Friday nights, dancing suggestively with the ladies on Saturday night wearing slacks and unbuttoned silk shirts showing off his chest hair and numerous but classy gold chains, and time well spent with good conversation. Ben was known for his heart-to-heart conversations held on his marshmallow-in-a-dumpster couch.
Despite all the appearances of having a life to be envious of, Ben felt a pang in his gullet every time he slept. Finally, after watching a particularly moving episode of Survivorman, Ben realized what that pang was. He wanted to get back to nature. Ben felt the reedy and musty bosom of Mother Nature cooing to him. He wanted to traipse through the forest in his boots and woolen socks bunched up like Mark Trail. Ben wanted to see wildlife as it was meant to be seen; not through some LCD screen, but up so close you can smell their disease-carrying parasites.
In the course of a week, Ben, not one usually for snap decisions, sold his apartment, quit his job at Bazooka Joe Incorporated, and packed up and headed to Briarberry. He had heard of Briarberry due to their world-famous raspberry jelly. The town depicted on the label was the exact sort of surroundings Ben was seeking. His head spun with the possibilities; maybe he’ll be a trail guide, maybe he can find Sasquatch!
It might have been the rush of living in a new place or maybe it was the fresh air suddenly filling every nook and cranny of Ben’s lungs, but he didn’t notice it at first. He didn’t even notice it when he went to sleep. Oh, but when Ben awoke five times during the night, he suddenly noticed it; it being the presence of the cougar turkeys. The cougar turkey, aside from the fantastic raspberry jelly, was the other claim to fame of Briarberry. The cougar turkeys descended from the mountain one day and stayed. The town was the only known place in the world that this bird had taken up residence. The birds prospered and from miles around they attracted people, ornithologists and lay person alike. This tourism allowed the town to become positively filthy in lucre and gave the town ample opportunity to hock its jelly, which more than eighty percent of the town was involved in the production of. A law was declared that the turkeys were not to be harmed in any way and every person had to give them right of way in every matter. A turkey crossing the road? The townsfolk had to stop and wait. A turkey in a living room? Let it be and maybe watch some television with it.
This might all have been bearable except for the one trait of the cougar turkey that didn’t arise until the turkeys went mad by eating so many raspberries. The turkeys screamed like a woman being murdered. And not in an occasional, soft, way like most birds might. They screamed from morning to night, night to morning, every day of the week. Near a thousand birds waddling around emanating a scream so blood curdling you’d think they were the reincarnated soul of Janet Leigh. The townsfolk were at first concerned and dismayed at this turn of events. They petitioned the Chamber of Commerce to fund a removal and relocation of the birds so they could get to sleep. The greed had dug deep into the hearts of the Chamber of Commerce and they had the town pass even more stringent laws forbidding anyone from harming or moving a turkey. There were a few incidents of townsfolk killing a turkey, only to be met with the immediate banishment of the offender from the town with his pants around his ankles and smothered in raspberry jelly. Needless to say, the ensuing chaos from the raspberry-jelly mad turkeys was horrific.
It was the fact of the screaming turkeys that Ben had pushed out of his mind while he congratulated himself on following through with his big plan to leave the city and find the perfect town nestled in the woods. Ben couldn’t go back to the city, though. His friends there would laugh at him returning home with his tail between his legs. “Here comes Ben, the woodsman. He certainly gave Nature what fore, I must say,” they would gloat in between sips of coffee of foreign sounding origin. He had burned all the bridges, figuratively and literally, at Bazooka Joe Incorporated so he wouldn’t be able to get his old job back. Ben at first thought he could learn to live with the screaming turkeys in order to prove to himself he wasn’t a failure at his woods adventure.
Ben continued living in Briarberry unhappily and in a near catatonic state. He did get a job at the raspberry jelly factory. Ben was the person licking the labels and placing them on the jars. Everyday he cursed those labels. Those thin strips of paper and adhesive that was like a siren song calling him to the town he thought looked so attractive. Now Ben felt like he got back at Briarberry a little at a time with each lick.
Ben endured the indignity of the screaming cougar turkeys while he went about his life. That was, until the morning he woke with the heavy-lidded eyes. With Death staring back at him in the mirror, Ben knew there was something he needed to do. “I’m going to kill every last goddamned cougar turkey in this town!”
If Ben was a more enterprising individual, he'd not only kill all of the cougar turkeys; he'd approach city hall and the powers-that-be and devise a plan to sell off the delicious birds. That's if they're delicious. If, conversely, they taste like poo, graphite, or aged leather, then the killing alone will suffice.
I'd just like to make a disclaimer that I was very sleep deprived when I wrote and then posted this. Finals week plus my newfound ability to never sleep ever equals this thing. I might continue on, I might not.
No reasons for apologies -- it's a good story with potential. I, for one, would like to see more. But I also wish you luck in your battle with insomnia.
There's a good sense of space, or maybe it's place, in this story -- I could really "feel" the town.
I actually happen to live, at present, in what some might call a "big city," and I'm astonished at how well you have described our recreational routine. Allot of people don't get that it's the classiness of our gold chains that separates us from the folks in the towns and hamlets.