Preview 2: A Slightly More Honest Preview

I was beginning to think that my alarm was, in fact, a sentient being, and sometime during its journey of digital self-discovery it realized that its sole purpose in existence was to cause me, personally, unending torment.

It’s not that it didn’t keep time. It did. It just did so in the most annoying manner possible, namely by waking me up every evening with an electronic wail that was something reminiscent of a banshee being humped by a Speak-and-Spell, a noise which cut through the fog of sleep like a Cadillac through a shopping mall, and which never failed to leave me disoriented and slightly panicked.

In an attempted truce, I had switched the alarm from “scraping a metal file across my inner ear” to “radio,” figuring that maybe Rachmaninoff would be a pleasant change of pace for us both. However, I made the mistake of underestimating this contraption’s undying hatred of me and all that I stand for. Instead of being gently lifted into consciousness in the arms of soothing strings and pleasant strands of piano, the hateful little bastard made it a point every day of falling ever-so-slightly out of tune, somehow managing to drop between three radio stations at once, mixing Beethoven's 7th Symphony with Mexican talk radio and alternative rock, interspersed with a healthy helping of static.

One evening, after discovering to my everlasting delight that the “Snooze” button no longer worked and that the radio could, in fact, beep and play several radio stations in concert, I finally snapped, slamming a fist through the its black plastic shell, ripping it out of the wall, and chucking it across the room, where it lay in offended silence.

I left it there for almost a week, isolated, devoid of sustenance, before checking to see if it still worked. No sooner had I plugged it in than crimson midnight flared angrily from its cracked digital face, and the little shit picked up right where it had left off, howling at me in Spanish and screaming at me in an octave that would have made a dog attempt suicide. I frantically began pushing buttons and toggling switches, eventually stumbling across the arcane combination which appeased the spiteful demon inside of it and lulling it into a temporary silence, lazily blinking the wrong time at me, smug in its victory despite its shattered edifice.

I taped it up and changed the time, but put it on the dresser across the room. I suppose I could have purchased a new clock. In fact, I really probably should have. But I had grown to have a sort of unhealthy respect for the little bastard, and began to redefine what I had originally classified as “the acts of Skynet Junior” as “quirks,” the same way a crazy old woman might call herself “eccentric” when anyone else would be calling Animal Control about her 70 cats.

And so it was that early Wednesday evening, the alarm howled a digital prayer for vengeance against all organics, and I lurched upright.