9-1-1 , What Is Your Emergency?

by Diane Sparks

Ruth and I exchanged looks at the fifteen minute mark. Fifteen minutes was not so strange, but perhaps we both sensed something was different that night. At the thirty minute mark we both chuckled nervously. Ruth was the first to break the silence (forty-five minutes into our shift) and remarked that it sure seemed unusual. She’s only been here a year; she wanted to know if this had happened to me before. In five years I haven’t gone five minutes without an emergency call, and I found the peace unsettling.

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Diane Sparks, author of Time to Celebrate?, is a born-again writer living in Chicago, with an M.A. in English and a day job in HR.