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The Life and Times of Patricia |
By the time she hit terminal velocity she began wondering if she had made the right decision to leap out of a 22nd story window instead of taking the stairs. She was tired, and the elevators had been out of service since Wednesday and, after all, if she didn't make it home soon she'd never have enough time to bake a pie before the big bake sale and ooh! she needed to pick up dry cleaning else she sport thrice-soiled underwear underneath her sundress and even if no one would find out she would still know and it would affect her whole persona all night long what with the itching and who has time to for all those stairs anyway?
So there she is, plummeting, and it's actually sort of a fun plummet except for the anxiety about impending and almost certain death but at least she had the comfort of knowing that the death would be her own so she wouldn't have to worry about mourning too much or not enough or even at all and what appropriate dress attire would be for the funeral and she sort of felt guilty about causing her family and acquaintances so much grief over little old her. She wondered how the headline would read for her obituary and speculated things like "Delicious Pie Left Unbaked As Woman Falls to Doom" or "Dry Cleaner: Woman's Underwear Far More Soiled Than Most."
When she leapt out of the window she imagined that she would hit the ground running with maybe a somersault or a cartwheel perhaps as an Olympic judge happened to be walking by and he would exclaim with great passion "HOLY LORD JESUS THAT'S THE MOST AMAZING SPECTACLE I'VE EVER SEEN" and immediately award her a gold medal or an honorary gold medal or at least help her get on all the talk shows but now she realized that with this much speed she probably couldn't stick the landing and her dreams of Olympic glory would be crushed along with most of her body.
And the moment before she introduces herself to the pavement she remembers that her last grandparent is supposed to die tomorrow or the next month and thinks for the first time I'm supposed to have quasi-mature feelings and coping mechanisms instead of little girl scared under a blanket as-long-as-I'm-under-here-everything-will-be-okay type feelings but the little girl scared under a blanket as-long-as-I'm-under-here-everything-will-be-okay type feelings are much more comforting and I know that collectively speaking mine is only one blade in life's field but I'm not going to marginalize anyone's loss including my own because that's what it means to be alive and if we can't help each other through this thing then what good are we at all and it sure feels big and important to me right now and it's okay to have feelings about things so I think I will and she weeps and curses anathema upon the elevator maintenance staff and also the architects who failed to recognize the need for escalators.
copyright 2007
Robert John
Miller |
