Tag Archives: Criminal Minds

The things that go quiet in the night

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The time on the clock read 2:29 am. The waning moon shared its luminescence with the corner of my bedroom and my eyes blinked repeatedly at the harsh difference between the blackness behind my eyelids and the moonlight permeating my bedroom.

love the moon

The sound that woke me was shrill and I tried to convince myself it had followed me from a nightmare. The uneasiness of my dog confirmed the polar opposite of my theory and together we looked out the bedroom window to discern where the awful noise was coming from.

My initial thought was that a baby raccoon was lost and crying out for its mother but it is the dead of winter and they are most likely sound asleep in their dens. As the cry continued, it became much more visceral and intense. My tension escalated and I could not drown out the suffering sounds of nature. There was nowhere I could protect myself from the wretched sound of terror.

The cry eventually lost its intensity and that sound of terror became more and more staggered until it was replaced by the silence of the night.  It took me a long time to get back to sleep.  Between my over-active imagination and my staunch passion for the television show Criminal Mind’s, I’m sure I had created over 200 plausible crime scenes by the time I finally nodded off.

I can only hope whatever predator was outside has moved on to a new hunting ground. And I sincerely wish we will not have to, ever again, listen to the unfortunate nocturnal requiem of the untimely death of wildlife that once felt safe to roam through our woods.

There’s a lot of DNA and it’s not a Criminal Minds episode

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I am officially glad I am no longer in my twenties.  Even when I was in my twenties, my regard for a sanitary living space and the respect of my roommates trumped any need to party like it didn’t matter.  I have recently discovered that this is apparently an old-fashioned way of thinking!

A new friend has had the challenging job of being the General Manager at a fast-paced restaurant in the area where I live.  I have frequented there many times and become friends with the staff through our mutual jobs and our shared love of football.  Sure they are a younger crowd and they like to party, but I had no concept of how many of the rules of human nature those parties violated until just recently.

I had a few drinks with the GM last night after he and the head of maintenance had spent the last two days cleaning the remains of those parties once the staff had vacated the houses for the season.  The pictures he took of the damage and the items left behind were shocking to me.  I would have requested a full hazmat suit before I even entered those seasonal dwellings.

dna

(image credit: dnaproject.co.za)

From 10 staff houses, they collected over 90 bags of garbage, repaired holes in drywall that were cleverly disguised by newly purchased plastic vent covers, disposed of a few comforters that would easily have contained so many samples of DNA they would keep a Forensics team busy for months, steam-cleaned carpets and collected an arsenal of bottles and cans from each yard.  The description of some of the parties left me speechless, and that is a tough feat considering I have a writer’s brain and nothing is off-limits when it comes to a story.

There is something extremely soothing about walking into my house and not fearing the unknown.  There will be no naked parties taking place, there will be no food on the counters and tables that have become science projects over an extended period of time and there will be no risk of seeing things that cannot be unseen.

I sure hope the two responsible for the clean up get to reward themselves with the accumulated amount of security deposits and bottle returns.  After those crime scenes, they deserve it!