Mort's Day

"Shamus and Findley sat silently on the slivered wooden bench as the dirty fog of darkness hovered over them. . . . "

So begins "Mourir," a short story I wrote as an assignment for grade 12 English. The story itself is best forgotten, but I am still intrigued by the idea of a Mort's Day--a term and concept borrowed from my high school physics teacher--which the story develops. According to Mr. Armstrong, a Mort's Day is a 24 hour period between 11:59 and 12:00 a.m. when time stops for everyone but you.

The possibilities are endless, though I most often wish for one when I enter my office and look wistfully at Edwyn C. Hoskyns and Noel Davey's The Riddle of the New Testament (London: Faber & Faber, 1931) or C.F.D. Moule's The Birth of the New Testament (3rd ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982) sitting unread on my shelves.

Perhaps as a warning against such utopian dreams, my short story concluded on a darker note, with the bench "stained red with Shamus' blood."