Chapter One- Adventures Of Glass

Chapter One

Morning. Every one hates waking to the sound of an alarm clock. The buzzing. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Except it isn't really even a beep so long as were talking about an onomatopoeia. Its more like a grinding noise. Combined.. with a screeching, like a cat who's tale has been stepped on “eeeeh eeeeeh eeeeeh eeeeeh” over and over until a fist comes slamming down angrily to turn it off.

Most people know the feeling. The hand reaches out from under a pillow or a blanket, or up from the side of the bed were its been hanging, wrinkles in the skin from impressions of were the blankets were moments ago pulled tight as you slept. The hand creeps out to the nightstand, gently feeling each surface til it finds the clock.

Then, after finding the clock, it searches clandestinely for the snooze button.

Graham's hand searched clandestinely for the snooze button. And when he found it, his tired fingers, weakened from not moving all night, formed a fist, weakened, but not without strength, and slammed down, as hard as they physically could, turning the alarm off, a reprieve from its endless screaming in his ear, much like a mother screaming at her child to get up before their late for school.

But Graham didn't have school. He hadn't had school for years. He thanked whatever higher power was out there for that. He had hated school. And he had loved it. He was the student that got shoved into lockers, and then got expelled from the school, for shoving someones head in a locker, repeatedly.

And he had loved those parts dearly. He held them in his mind fondly, and often found himself fantasizing about such behavior again at work in the diner. Work. That reminded him. He had work.

He reallllllllly hated work. Waking up every damn day, the same damn way, just to go downstairs, wait for Daniel to drag his lazy werewolf a*s out of bed, and make coffee and burnt food. His specialty in the diner was burnt food. Which he liked personally. He hated customers frankly. He had no desire to speak with them, see them, or breath the same air as them. He hated people in general really. And he had the worst job for it. He took to swearing in french so Danial wouldn't fire him for calling customers such colorful names as , fat cows, pigs, b******s, and retards, and anything else he could come up with.

Graham was of average height by just a bit, and much less than average weight, these were the two aspects that made him stand like an offended heron, head hanging forward often, but not looking down, just slouching, which still left him a bit shorter than most of the people he knew.

His eyes were both brown, and uninteresting, and his hair was equally brown, and equally uninteresting. He himself, was interesting. He had a passion for mysteries and hated cooking. Making it a mystery, as to why he'd taken up cooking as a profession.

Graham Glass was an eccentric man who never believed he was getting paid enough, despite the only employee Of Daniel D'Amico. He didn't believe in such a thing as cheating, and thought that it was perfectly acceptable to do whatever necessary to get the job done. And like many detectives, he believes in the interconnectedness of all things. He believes all cases are truly one case, believing the more unrelated crimes committed, the more it will all make sense.

He had trouble with this fact on many occasions, and when watching shows like law and order, he would mix case fact with shows like CSI, and seem to thoroughly believe in his mind, that the two cases, or sometimes as many as for at once, were all connected. The perpetrator being one in the same.

Again, he believes if he finds a broken egg in the carton in his fridge at his diner, it must have something to do with the disappearance of his neighbors cat. An assumption most sane people would find preposterous.

And on the contrary, Graham, was not a sane man. His eggs were not all in the basket. He was missing some marbles. He was fries short of a happy meal. In short, he was, a loony. At least that's what the 'normal' people called him.

He was bipolar in his mood swings, changing drastically from day to day, that his roommate Daniel, often suspected him of either hiding some form of drug abuse that could make one think they could fly, or that the man had some other mental disorder, that prevented him from being proper or social in any way.

Graham was a bit older, and liked to spend his hours where no one would call him, sitting in the back room, instead of waiting tables at the cafe like he was supposed to. He'd rather sit there playing Sudoku in his puzzle book, and ponder the interconnectedness of all things alive, and dead, of all things that happened, and will happen, of all the things that never happened, and never would happen etc, so on and so forth.

In other words, one could literally write for hours about the intricacies of Graham Glass's lunacy.

But I wont.

By the late afternoon, he felt as if every noise in the cafe rang in his ears. He wasn't cooking anything new today, and had been serving left over food from the day before, which any bored of health director would have screwed him over for if they'd found out about it.

But now it was not the sound of the alarm clock that drove him to a near postal state of mind.

It was the sound of everything ringing through what others might call a quiet place. But as he sat there waiting for Daniel, waiting for his friends transformation to end, the brilliant college drop out-chef, and kitchen menace, sat waiting in the breakfast diner upstairs, all he could hear, was most definitely not silence. It was not quiet. It was not even remotely soft. Nor gentle. Not to his ears, trained to ease drop in conversations and pick up things, even if he hadn't wanted to hear them in the first place.

The clatter of cups being picked up, and knives and forks scraped across plates as the last morsels of some greasy fattening, and ridiculously 'Cajun' meal, was finished left him with goosebumps as a shiver ran down his spine. To him, it was like listening to Styrofoam rub up against Styrofoam. He'd rather eat with chopsticks. He usually did. He preferred Chinese and Asian food any way. He couldn't cook anything decent to save his life, unless cook meant burnt, or you wanted a microwavable thing like a hot pocket.

Then their was the talking. Gossiping. Who screwed who. Who thought what. Who hated who. Who loved who. Who just wanted to f**k who. In his opinion.. who really gave a f**k?

And then arguing. Who paid the rent last. Who did the dishes last. Who left the light on. Who's fault it was. Who broke the china set. Why did so and so have to come. Who should have one the election.

Once again, the real question was? Who gave a f**k? He for one. Did not.

Graham looked back and forth, between customers. One had told him the meal was undercooked twice already. And now they were motioning for him to come over again. In his minds eye, he could clearly see himself getting the Lysol aerosol spray can from behind the counter, and the lighter in his pocket, and going over to the person's plate, and switching both on at the same time, setting off a flame thrower type effect.

No. he decided upon an action that was much milder, and while just as likely would have gotten him fired from any where else, less likely for a lawsuit. He simple went over to the table. Took the plate. And pushed it off the table, shouting at the customer, about how if he wasn't happy about the damn food, how he should go home. And cook his own damn food.

But as soon as he went back behind the counter, Graham hadn't been able to sit back and relax. He had been almost immediately drawn back into noticing all the noises of the cafe-diner. Forks and knives. Blaming and arguing. And even more noises. The bell of the door opening and closing. Laughter. A weeping girl at one table where the boyfriend had broken up. A few tables over a man kept flicking his phone open checking the time, as if he'd been stood up by someone he liked a lot, but obviously didn't fancy a second date with after this.

Needless to say, Graham was on the verge of going postal. The Irish man sat behind the counter, a small pocket knife in his hand, stabbed down into the counter, digging deeper and deeper into the linoleum counter top, as he day dreamed about stabbing a customer to death. How he desperately desired to just pull out his kitchen knives, and one by one, kill every. Living. Thing. In that diner.