Author's Note: This is a story my brother and I wrote for his English class. He was given about two months to write a ten-page story on Microsoft Word (double-spaced). He put it off until the last possible moment. So, I intervened and basically wrote this up, with him adding some input. It took about two hours, and he turned it in the next day. It got a perfect score.
It was on a Sunday like any other that Father Peter sat in his office chewing on the end of a pencil, poring over the original King James Bible and not understanding it at all.
Actually, it was not a Sunday like any other, because this particular Sunday happened to be the third of March, and Father Peter’s church, The Holy andSacredChurchof the Adamant Followers of Our Lord and Savior, would now have gone precisely one year without a proper doorman.
After reading the third verse of the book of Thessalonians for the fifth time without actually taking in a word of it, he bit slightly too hard on the small rubbery surface of his pencil’s eraser. The eraser proceeded to fall into his throat and became lodged in his diaphragm.
It was a matter of approximately one-fourth of a second before Father Peter realized that the eraser was no longer wedged between his two rows of almost-perfectly-white teeth, but rather was poised somewhere between his tongue and stomach. This immediately sent him into a panic, for Father Peter had had many traumatic experiences as a child involving the swallowing of small objects that were never intended for quite that purpose.
Upon this realization, Father Peter’s primitive survival instincts kicked in, and he realized that if he did not wish to die in this embarrassing way, he should probably get someone’s attention so they could do something to save him, preferably via the Heimlich Maneuver. He began to throw office supplies across the room, resulting in obnoxiously loud crashes, except in the case of the roll of duct tape, which instead made sort of a thunk.
Fortunately for Father Peter, it was at this precise moment that one member of his congregation, an unemployed former pastry chef named Heinrich Resnovington, was walking by quite close to the priest’s office. He paid no attention to the various crashes, as they were quite common on the weekends, but thought that something might be wrong when he heard the thunk from the duct tape hitting the door. Father Peter would never throw the Holy Duct Tape unless it was a dire emergency.
Deciding quickly to take action, like the hero in a cool and violent television program, he grabbed the door’s handle, pulled it downward forty degrees, and pushed the door open by applying kinetic energy to its surface. When he stepped magnificently into the office, he saw Father Peter sitting at his desk, his eyes bugging out like little plastic rodents in a Whack-a-Mole machine, his face the color of a crayon that happens to be a fleshy-purple color. The priest was about to throw his favorite stapler, when he spotted Heinrich and pointed to his throat.
Heinrich simply stared at him in a puzzled way at first, but since he happened to be the Kentucky State Champion of charades, he quickly determined what Father Peter was trying to say. He ran around to the other side of the desk, tossed the priest unceremoniously onto the floor, and breathed deeply into his mouth for several seconds, after which he proceeded to thrust into his torso at a ten-degree angle and in one-second intervals.
Father Peter began flailing his flabby arms in protest, and Heinrich noticed that he had mixed up two very important methods of life-saving. He had been absent on that day in Health class, because his father had taken him on a three-day fishing trip in the Mediterranean Sea. Luckily, he was a relatively quick thinker, and immediately sat the priest up so he could perform the correct procedure.
Several detailed sentences later, the piece of eraser that had previously been lodged in Father Peter’s throat sat on the carpet, covered in a thin layer of the priest’s saliva. He stood up and shook Heinrich’s hand.
