Hendrik Vallaerts

            On Friday at about 3:00 my upstairs neighbour Jacob was banging on something. 

            At 3:45 the fire alarm started bonking and continued for half an hour until the firemen came. I could hear them in the hall but I didn’t get up to check on whether there was actually a fire. I fell asleep and dreamed that I went out to talk with them and saw that unit 2 was totally gutted and black. Of course it wasn’t. 

            After yoga I gathered more images from the internet for my photo-video of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I weighed 91.1 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Kramer electric during song practice and it didn’t stay in tune as well as yesterday but it wasn’t too bad. 

            Around midday I painted the underside of my top bathroom shelves with “blue bliss”. I also straightened out the lines where the top shelves meet the walls. It looks good but it’ll need at least one more coat, which I’ll add on Tuesday. 

            I weighed 91.8 kilos before lunch.

            I took a siesta at 14:30 as usual but didn’t wake up until 17:15. My body was probably making up for its loss of sleep while the fire alarm was sounding. It was too late for a bike ride.

            I weighed 91.95 kilos at 17:40. 

            I called my periodontist Dr. Xia and left a message to let him know I was almost finished with the Peridex mouth rinse and wondered if I could go back to regular mouthwash. He got back to me an hour later and said I could use warm salted water instead. He also said I could lightly brush the area of surgery now. I’m looking forward to getting the twenty stitches out. I can feel the ends of the threads and it feels like I’ve got a spider in my mouth. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 18:41. 

            I recorded from cassette tape through audio interface to Audacity and then extracted to my hard drive side 2 of the Bomb Shelter Light demo tape. The next tape I’ll digitize is one containing pre-verbal sounds my daughter made when she was small. 

            I created some more sub-folders for photos in my SSD and deleted several images from my hard drive. 

            I boiled a potato in vegetable broth, added spinach, and five-year old cheddar. I put in a little too much salt. I ate while watching season 1, episode 26 of Combat. 

            K Company is battling the Germans in what is supposed to be an evacuated French town. Then they notice a beautiful young woman sitting in a rose garden oblivious to the gunfire and the explosions. Oddly the garden has been untouched while outside its gate the streets are torn up. The Germans retreat but will be back and they outnumber K Company. Saunders enters the garden to try to get the woman to leave. The young woman’s name is Jeannine and she is with her caregiver, the elderly Celeste. Jeannine has lost her family and now lives in a delusional fantasy of peace in the garden. Celeste speaks English and tells Saunders that divine intervention is protecting Jeannine and her garden. She says that Jeannine will die if she leaves. 

            Later Saunders comes back to try again. Although Jeannine cannot speak English she has taken a liking to Saunders and follows him when he leads her to the gate. But then she sees the devastation outside and has a panic attack. She retreats to the garden. 

            Saunders goes back to his company. The Germans begin to shell the town and Lieutenant Hanley tells Saunders to try again to get the civilians out. Jeannine is playing a record and wants Saunders to dance with her. Celeste points a rifle at Saunders and forces him to do so. He doesn’t really have to be forced. After a while Jeannine becomes very calm in his arms and he picks her up to carry her out of the garden with Celeste following. He lays her down in a stable at the command post but when she wakes up she panics. Doc gives her an injection that puts her to sleep. 

            The Germans stop firing for the night and everyone goes to sleep. Jeannine wakes up and wanders back to her garden. Saunders finds her there as German troops occupy the town. A machine gun nest is holding K Company down. There’s an abandoned tank nearby with the big gun out of commission but the machine gun works. Caje tries to get to it but is wounded. Saunders successfully gets into the tank and uses the machine gun to take out the nest. The Germans are gone from the town for now. Jeannine and Celeste are back in the garden and Jeannine gives Saunders a rose before he leaves. 

            This story was written by Hendrik Vallaerts, who started as a writer for Frank Sinatra’s radio show. He wrote the Star Trek episode “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”. He wrote six scripts of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and created the minisub they used in the series. He wrote the two episodes of Batman for which he created the villain the Bookworm.