The Whole Time: Stories for First Responders

Nothing in this book will frighten you.Nobody is in danger. No child is hurt. Not one of these thirty stories happens on a call.They happen in the shower line at base camp on day nine. In the shop at six in the morning. At the laundromat at nine at night, washing smoke out of your own clothes. In the ninety minutes of standing around that nobody ever puts in a book.A captain floods her own kitchen and finds out she has been lonely in a building full of people who like her. A dispatcher answers a phone nobody has used since 1974. A mechanic gets hit in the face by a notebook. A volunteer spends twelve years trying to get a key to a locked gate, and finds out on foot what the key would have cost him. A lieutenant with twenty six years in gets asked by a ten year old whether he is going to be okay.Thirty firefighters, medics, dispatchers and police officers. Every one of them wanted something they had trouble saying out loud. Every one of them got an answer they were not shopping for.Funny, honest, and clean enough to hand your mother. Read one at ten forty at night with the television on, then put it down.He was there the whole time.The Whole Time is a series of story collections for the people who hold everything together.