Hypertension

A Fergus Johnson story of gender relations

Fergus and his wife, Doris, were driving to town. He had a doctor’s appointment to follow-up on his new prescription for high blood pressure. They had both begun watching their salt intake and enjoyed seeing themselves lose a few pounds of water weight.

Fergus had done some additional research and decided to also reduce the sources of stress in his life. He began by declining to accept a new project at work until he was closer to finishing the ones he was already committed to. Doris, knew how worked-up he could get in city traffic, and volunteered to drive.

Seeing a group of girls, standing together in front of a store, Fergus turned his gaze to look at them. There were four, dressed in casual summer clothes — unusually bright colors — two were wearing shorts. One of the girls in shorts had particularly well-shaped legs — not those little toothpick legs so common on high school kids.

Doris saw him look. It didn’t usually bother her. Fergus tended to have high situational awareness. Doris reminded herself that he was a “keen observer of life." He frequently pointed out interesting details to her. Doris smiled as she recalled the time that she had made the humorous observation that Fergus was also “a keen observer of women.”

Story: Sample Time

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Sample Time

from the book: Life Will Get You in the End:
Short stories by David Satterlee

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Life Will Get You in the End:
Short Stories by David Satterlee

A retired engineer just can't escape the frustration he feels with the casual imprecision of his former supervisors and his current nurse. Writing the story resolved my actual recurring dream.

Sample Time

The miserable old man lay in his hospital bed, staring at the clock on the wall. The nurse had just left after waking him from a vivid dream to take a sample of his blood. They were probably checking to see if he still had elevated amylase and lipase enzymes in his blood; indicating pancreatitis. “Hell,” he mused, his stomach was still distended; anyone could see that. “Hell,” he mused, “if the disease doesn’t kill me, all this bloodletting will.”

He hated that dream. It haunted him from before he retired; before his wife had died; before he started drinking. Always, he was railing against an illogical way of doing things at the gasoline refinery where he used to work. Sometimes he was complaining to other engineers; occasionally to supervisors, managers, or even the working stiffs whose only concern was to follow orders. Always, nobody seemed to think that his issues were important enough to worry about, to say nothing of making the major changes for which he lobbied. It was the way that things had been done for years. It had become codified into operational software and work habits. Nobody seemed to care—nobody had ever cared except that noble champion of what was right and true that he used to be; this impotent, disillusioned, and very desolate old man that he was now.

In his dream, the engineer, still an earnest, idealistic, and fastidiously through young man, is speaking: “I have reviewed our new plant-wide data acquisition and reporting system. It has several design flaws, related to