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Quidnunc
It was teatime at the OK Corral.
The shooting outside had just died down, the dead bodies of... damn, who was it again? Well, it was either Doc Holliday or Something Kid or another. She thought she'd better run back into the employee locker room and have a quick skim of the pre-teatime shootout history lesson. They really came down hard on her when she got that thing wrong about the Mexicans and Canadians inventing hockey between themselves on old frozen water troughs for the horses.
She thought it was a bit harsh, and was made to sit in the stockade for a day, and those damn kids were ruthless, chucking all sorts of Corral-provided tomatoes. And it's not like that little twerp Brad was much help, standing there against the fence, pretending he was incredibly interested in what the damn sheep were doing every time she glared over at him, trying to catch his glance and, if at all possible, burn a hole right into his beady little soul. He was the one, after all, that set up the stupid question that fat kid asked about "what are Mexicans?" when they were tag-teaming the school trip, as you had to do these days. If you went it alone those kids'd just eat you alive, these days. Of course, if you got set up by your own damn partner when you were taking the kids past the sheriff, who, in the OK Corral's cutesy little way was in charge of staffing and all that good stuff, you weren't much better off. They might as well have just thrown you to the kids with no partner, no plastic gloves in case you had to peel yet another OK Corral Lollipop off yet another kid's face (these damn lollipops were supposed to be authentic Western sorta lollipops, right, but there'd be a lot of horses with big patches of hair missin' and the gunfights'd be a lot more exciting/involving for bystanders if they did eat these things back then, she was thinking of trying them out on getting a set of shelves that refused to stay up with conventional methods of nail and screw to finally stick. Literally.), and no lasso prop that also served, in extreme emergencies, to ward kids off your legs. Now, she'd never had to use the lasso herself, but she saw one guy have to use it, once, when it looked like he was about to be pulled down into the teaming mass of schoolkids, but he managed to get it free from his belt and swinging slowly at first, but then it sort of *shucked* into place and he had a protective barrier around his legs, free of the kids except one little skinny kid who was bawling his brains out, and something like that'll get back to the other kids, and sure enough, that group and their peers'll give you a little bit of distance.
So she sure as hell didn't want to go through that again.
Besides which, they were in the high hills of Maine, and although they were a bit west in the context of the state, this probably wasn't where the real OK Corral had stood, and certainly not what people generally meant when they started talking about Butch Cassidy and the thing and the Wild West and Natty Bumppo and all that.
She made her way back to the employee locker room.
And wasn't she surprised to see Brad and the sheriff back there, rifling through the books, ink stains all over both their faces and the tell tale smudge of ink peeking out of page 435 in the OK Corral history, the section on the chipmunks.
disclaimer:
And you know what, upon returning to Heathrow, and yet another distinct lack of Clare girls in bikinis, they really have to do something to that airport to make it more conducive to Clare girls in bikinis. Or people in general, seeing as Heathrow these days resembles some sort of experiment someone was doing when they were hanging around the lab, chucking crumpled up paper at the bin, and turned to Bill, the other lab guy who was always skiving off for lunch early and returning late, and said, "Hey man, let's run down to the airport and see how many people we can jam in the arrivals hall. What do you say?"
To which Bill probably told him (or her) to get lost or a suitable equivalent sentiment, and he or she did just that, heading down from the lab to Heathrow, where they got in the booth sitting behind a one-way mirror, looking down on all those people arriving from all over the place, looking like lab rats with back packs and computer bags and screaming kids and fold-away prams and natty hair from being on a plane for the last twelve hours.
Introduce some pre-existing luggage that defy polite notions of bulky and voilá! A bunch of people standing around, thinking they're moving towards some end goal, like leaving the arrivals hall, but in fact doomed, like Sisyphus, if Sisyphus had to push that great big rock through an airport terminal instead of up a hill.
At which point the mad scientist runs off to go find vultures to try out some other Greek myth-parallels on the poor people in the terminal.
And they want to put in another terminal over at Heathrow... good luck.
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