Forty Minutes to Deadline

Corentin had forty minutes. The sports page closed at eleven, and at twenty past ten he was standing in the middle of the square in Vierzon with a dying phone and no quote worth printing.

The club had won that afternoon and gone up a division, the first time in nineteen years, and the whole town had come out for it. Somebody had put speakers in a first-floor window. Somebody's father was giving out beer from the back of a van.

He had the captain already, but the captain had said what captains say. “It's a huge night for the town,” the captain told him, and then said the same thing again in different words. Corentin wrote it down and knew that he wouldn't use it. Without a real line, the piece was only a result, and the result had been on the internet since six o'clock.

He tried the manager next. The manager was on somebody's shoulders and couldn't hear him.

At twenty to eleven Corentin gave up and moved to the edge of the square to write what he had. That was where the groundskeeper was standing, still in his work jacket, watching the players from thirty metres away, not moving at all.

Corentin asked him, without much hope, what the night meant to him.

“I've cut that grass for thirty-one years,” the old man said. He thought for a moment. “Tomorrow morning I'll cut it again, and it'll be exactly the same grass. That's the strange part. Nothing about it has changed, and I can't sleep.”

Corentin wrote it down and ran.

When he got back to the office it was five to eleven. He filed the piece with the groundskeeper's line at the top and the score at the bottom. The editor read it over his shoulder, and the only thing she said was, “Who's the guy?”

“He cuts the grass,” Corentin said.