April was halfway to a two Snickers sugar buzz and was grateful to be alive. She was pounding through her work in record time, replying to three month's worth of e-mail-all at once in one mass, slightly hysterical rambling e-mail-and had changed her e-mail signature to read "Today is the greatest day of your life. Trust me, I know". She spouted about how she was saved by the Benadryl, and encouraged everyone she knew to set up their own personal Benadryl alter at their desks in order to properly worship the god that had inadvertently saved her. There was much snickering by the recipients in the Cube Farm, but April didn't care, so was high on life and Snickers bars.
Death sat on the windowsill fuming. His nebulous black presence filtered out all light, making it look like it was dusk. But only in the window in which he sat. Through the other windows, it looked like the brilliant summer morning that it was. Some of April's coworkers noticed this, but no one was motivated enough to hoist themselves from their chairs to try to figure out why one the view from window was nearly black and the others not. Some of her more industrious coworkers tried to look the phenomenon up on wikipedia.com, but since they didn't have a concrete name for it, it made searching it out a challenge. Some spent hours trying to come up with answers, but death, though technically invisible must still have given off some eerie vibe, as no one moseyed over to see what he looked like close up.
Death could not believe that she could get that lucky. Again. It was getting old, and now his beach plans were shot to hell, as well as his weekend frisbee football tournament plans. There was no way to recover and stay within his proscribed forty-hour workweek. Now he was going to have to get his supervisor to sign off on his working of the weekend, and at this point, that was the best-case scenario. The worst- case scenario would be to have to hand this case over to his boss and let her finish April off. Asking for that kind of assistance was for the losers-nobody wanted to escalate to Deader, that kind of thing had a way of coming back to haunt you at performance evaluation time. Not to mention raise time. CRAP! It was time to get mean and ugly and to work smarter, not harder. If only he could figure out what that meant, he might be able to pull it off.....
Death skulked in the window looking for answers, sending tiny black clouds soaring across the ceiling of the cube farm, further puzzling the Wikkies who struggled to find meaning for them, while taking video of the scuttling clouds on their cell phones and calling CNN to report their weird indoor weather. How could she die? It had to be fast-like now. It had to be painful, as she was really starting to piss him off and it had to let him dissipate so he could move on to his next stop. He still had eighteen people to knock off by his department's next update meeting, which would be Monday meeting. It was now Friday, near lunchtime for those who could still ingest solid foods.
Lunchtime.... Somehow April's lunch was going to kill her. This was Plan D and he couldn't go any farther than that, so it had to work. That was it- wherever she was, whatever she was doing, she would choke to death, it would be lonely and painful and she's be conscious for two to three minutes, so she'd get to look in his face as she checked out and he would triumph. He drifted back toward her desk to figure out what she had planned for lunch.
April, who usually walked for an hour on her lunch, was trying to figure out the same thing. She was feeling lazy, did she want to get her three miles in today, making over fifteen miles for the week? Or did she want to go nap in the car and try to get close to the recommended eight hours of sleep that she was three hours short on for last night alone? She wasn't that hungry, since the celebratory Snickers infusion, so she grabbed her apple and put her coat on. She would decide once she got outside if she was walking just to her car, or out to the "Nature Trail", which mostly portrayed the ills of human nature over any other kind, but underneath the flotsam of litter, running water was visible flowing through the creek bed.
She grabbed an apple from her fruit bowl. April hated to shop and hated to run out of things even more, so when she did finally shop, she bough in quantity and she bought two of everything, so that she had a full supply of food at work. This worked fine for bagels and small quantities of fruit to be eaten quickly, but sometimes the bowl of rapidly decomposing fruit and its accompanying flies was an issue in the Cube Farm. Today, however, there were just a few items of barely ripe and still firm fruit, so there had been no protestors about. A few more days, however...and they'd all be out there circling with their signs and chanting in front of her cube in support of the decaying fruit.
April bit into her apple, just as her e-mail notification dinged. She sat back down to read the e-mail while chewing a too-large bite of apple. Or trying to chew. Death, perched on her desk next to her monitor screen smirked as he watched each movement of her jaw muscles. He was counting down. NOW. April swallowed, realizing too late that she hadn't chewed that chunk of Granny Smith's bitter apple nearly enough. The chunk lodged in her throat and shut down her airway. She was beginning to panic, she realized that she could not 'cough, speak or breathe', like the posters all say and would dearly love some intervention. But everyone else was at lunch. Those folks are never late to a meal, and no one was around. She quickly traipsed through the cubes, looking for just one hard working person who didn't run off to lunch at the stroke of noon (or, knowing her co-workers, half an hour before noon.) She found no one.
Her eyes started to bulge out of their sockets and their watering sent salty tears cascading down her face. She thought it ironic that while she was choking to death, she could still taste the salt of her own tears. She thought about calling 9-1-1, but realized that they couldn't arrive soon enough to save her. She recognized that she was down to a minute, maybe thirty seconds left. She hurled herself against the wall, but this resulted in the apple wedging itself deeper yet and breaking her left radius, not that that would matter much longer.
April couldn't believe that it could end this way. She touched up her lipstick and brushed her hair. She was aware that a whole bunch of people would soon be staring at her lifeless body, for the last time in fact, so she may as well look as good as possible under the circumstances. Her final thought was of her dogs waiting for her at home. Death's leer could practically be heard from a mile away and his celebratory dance-a combination of the moonwalk, the cabbage patch and a little bit of the bus stop-was inspired.
April didn't hear the door open, nor feel the resonant booming voice of Dumpy's boss as he strolled into the farm. He came up behind her, assuming that she was reading the e-mail still open on her screen and heartily whacked her on the back a few times in his typical hello gesture. This was his normal greeting, and while she had come to hate it and mastered avoiding interacting with him after the last time when he broke three ribs and she bit off and swallowed the tip of her tongue, this time she could not resist.
Death, watching the events unfold, screamed "NO!" He formed dark circling clouds and tried to blot out Dumpy's boss, but to no avail.
Dumpy's boss hid his surprise at the resulting violent explosion of air and still recognizable apple that splattered across her monitor, as he glanced at her slick, reddened face her eyes popped open (she had closed them- she didn't want everyone to see her body with bulging eyes and was worried that closing a dead person's eyes wasn't as easy as they made it look on TV.) He stepped back. She breathed deeply, aware that for the second time in barely as many hours, she had escaped death. As her brain's oxygen supply returned to normal, she was beginning to notice a pattern. And she didn't like it.
Death was reduced to hysterical tears, sobbing and screaming and thinking about how this woman clearly has one hell of a guardian angel looking out for her. What the hell was he going to do now? Time to call in help, even if it means a demotion. There could be other powers at work here, powers that he didn't even know about, much less have any idea how to defeat...
Copyright 2007 Antigone Lett. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Friday, November 16, 2007
The Stalker, continued
Continued from 11/8/07:
Death couldn’t believe the dumb luck. It must be April’s lucky day. Too bad she would not get to appreciate it for long.
Death sighed. Actually, he swore a blue streak. He could not believe that this idiot was going to ruin his afternoon at the beach! Not only that, but he was already behind on his claims for the day and he may never get a chance to catch up. He may have to work on the weekend and there was nothing that Death’s minions hated more than working on the weekend. He was getting mad and as such, he was taking off the gloves. So much for quick and painless- this time she would know what hit her. She would feel the pain and know that her last moments were ebbing from her soon to be lifeless body and that there was nothing she could do about it.
Upon her hurried arrival at work, April ran for the door, hoping to get to her cube unnoticed. Once there, with the computer on, she could pretend that she had been there for an hour already, and then casually go out to get a coffee refill. No one would realize that it was her first cup and that every cell of her being was screaming for its morning caffeine fix.
Death was way ahead of her. What are the best ways to die at work? Scalded to death by coffee? Too messy. Lightning strike through the window? Seems farfetched but he may be able to swing it. A raging pack of pit bulls? Maybe later, on her lunch break, but this had to be over by then. Electrocuted by a chamomile tea-dipped iPod headphone? Not sure that would do anything but make her ear sticky. Carbon monoxide leak? That would work, if he wanted big numbers, but frankly it seemed wasteful to take so many when you just want the one. Something creative. He was mad and now he wanted to get even with the pain of her death. THINK.
April was sitting quietly at her desk, after getting her coffee and downing some Benadryl for a runny nose. She was a hypochondriac and kept a drawer full of medicine at her desk, just in case. This made her popular with the meth-making cleaning crowd, as they could no longer buy some of the drugs, but they could lift hers when they were ready to cook a new batch. She had noticed the disappearance of her drugs, and had taken to buying in bulk and having a secret, backup drug drawer to make sure she always had whatever she could possibly need.
After carefully reviewing her Human Resources and medical records, Death saw the perfect solution. The file cabinets were dusty and everyone in HR was asleep at their desks (though frankly it was hard to tell the difference), so no one noticed the ball of shadows moving stealthily through the department and then rifling through the personnel files. Because he had once, still in human form, been fired by HR, he took the opportunity of their ‘team meeting’ to draw mustaches on each of their faces with different colored sharpies.
April was pretending to work, while actually surfing the Entertainment Tonight site. She was addicted; she was willing to admit it. But she wouldn’t admit it to her boss. And when she heard his polyester pant legs rubbing together as he waddled in her direction, she hit Alt + Tab so fast that the spreadsheet she flipped to was dizzy. She heard a buzzing coming toward her, as well as the polyester pants and she smelled smoke- probably from all of those polyesters being tormented by the friction of the round dwarf’s forward motion.
Between the buzzing and the wisp of smoke, April froze for a moment, trying to piece together what was going on. Only as she watched the bee sting her hand, leave its stinger and fall dead to her desk, did she realize that the sensory overload was brought on by independent events. Once she determined that, she wondered how a bee got in the office in December. Only then did she remember that she is allergic to bee stings. And she started to panic.
She had heard and read all the warnings about bee stings and anaphylaxis and made it a habit to never go outside in the summer during daytime in order to avoid the possibility of meeting up with a stinging insect that could kill her. As her mind raced, her body acted in slow motion, or more accurately no motion at all. April could see her funeral, she could see how sad her dogs would be without her to bake cookies for them each night and she could see her parents spending her life insurance policy on a combination of cruises and TV infomercials. Her breath was ragged, she was struggling to breathe, it was getting harder and harder to get the air into her lungs, when he boss (known as Dumpy in the coffee room) rounded the corner and stared at her.
“Why are you sitting at your desk sobbing when there’s work to do? That spreadsheet isn’t going to fill itself in with useless numbers, you know.”
April blinked. She realized she couldn’t breathe because she was crying while trying to vocalize her will (she had never written one down), in case anyone was recording her last moments, not because her airway had swelled up. Her hand had hardly swelled from the sting and she removed the stinger, still unable to believe that she had been stung and lived to tell about it. She was definitely going to get a Snickers bar to celebrate her good fortune. Maybe two. And she would definitely make Benadryl part of the daily preventative cocktail- apparently you can never be too careful.
Death sat steaming in the window. Trying to figure out why this woman just could not be killed. The stakes were getting higher and she just would not cooperate. Die already, dammitt! I have things to do- I don’t have all day to spend trying to kill your sorry self. He wished he had the power to speak, maybe if he could explain it to her, she’d let him take her. But alas, in exchange for omnipotence and the power to take life, one had to give up assuming a visible form and the gift of speech.
Death reviewed the options. Are we up to Plan D now? He had almost never had to go to Plan C before, and now he had to think of Plan D? Plan D had better work, as Death, never a good student, wasn’t sure which letter followed D in the alphabet and just might have to give up after this attempt if he couldn’t figure it out.
April sat at her desk, eyes and cheeks still red, but now with chocolate smeared on her chin. She was counting her blessings and swearing to herself that she wouldn’t take anything for granted anymore. She would be a better person. She would stop kicking the homeless guy in front of her house each morning as she headed out. She would stop baiting the neighbor’s cats into her garage so her dogs could play with them. Really she would be a better person with her new lease on life….
To be continued…………………………………..
Copyright Antigone Lett. All rights reserved, etc. etc......
Death couldn’t believe the dumb luck. It must be April’s lucky day. Too bad she would not get to appreciate it for long.
Death sighed. Actually, he swore a blue streak. He could not believe that this idiot was going to ruin his afternoon at the beach! Not only that, but he was already behind on his claims for the day and he may never get a chance to catch up. He may have to work on the weekend and there was nothing that Death’s minions hated more than working on the weekend. He was getting mad and as such, he was taking off the gloves. So much for quick and painless- this time she would know what hit her. She would feel the pain and know that her last moments were ebbing from her soon to be lifeless body and that there was nothing she could do about it.
Upon her hurried arrival at work, April ran for the door, hoping to get to her cube unnoticed. Once there, with the computer on, she could pretend that she had been there for an hour already, and then casually go out to get a coffee refill. No one would realize that it was her first cup and that every cell of her being was screaming for its morning caffeine fix.
Death was way ahead of her. What are the best ways to die at work? Scalded to death by coffee? Too messy. Lightning strike through the window? Seems farfetched but he may be able to swing it. A raging pack of pit bulls? Maybe later, on her lunch break, but this had to be over by then. Electrocuted by a chamomile tea-dipped iPod headphone? Not sure that would do anything but make her ear sticky. Carbon monoxide leak? That would work, if he wanted big numbers, but frankly it seemed wasteful to take so many when you just want the one. Something creative. He was mad and now he wanted to get even with the pain of her death. THINK.
April was sitting quietly at her desk, after getting her coffee and downing some Benadryl for a runny nose. She was a hypochondriac and kept a drawer full of medicine at her desk, just in case. This made her popular with the meth-making cleaning crowd, as they could no longer buy some of the drugs, but they could lift hers when they were ready to cook a new batch. She had noticed the disappearance of her drugs, and had taken to buying in bulk and having a secret, backup drug drawer to make sure she always had whatever she could possibly need.
After carefully reviewing her Human Resources and medical records, Death saw the perfect solution. The file cabinets were dusty and everyone in HR was asleep at their desks (though frankly it was hard to tell the difference), so no one noticed the ball of shadows moving stealthily through the department and then rifling through the personnel files. Because he had once, still in human form, been fired by HR, he took the opportunity of their ‘team meeting’ to draw mustaches on each of their faces with different colored sharpies.
April was pretending to work, while actually surfing the Entertainment Tonight site. She was addicted; she was willing to admit it. But she wouldn’t admit it to her boss. And when she heard his polyester pant legs rubbing together as he waddled in her direction, she hit Alt + Tab so fast that the spreadsheet she flipped to was dizzy. She heard a buzzing coming toward her, as well as the polyester pants and she smelled smoke- probably from all of those polyesters being tormented by the friction of the round dwarf’s forward motion.
Between the buzzing and the wisp of smoke, April froze for a moment, trying to piece together what was going on. Only as she watched the bee sting her hand, leave its stinger and fall dead to her desk, did she realize that the sensory overload was brought on by independent events. Once she determined that, she wondered how a bee got in the office in December. Only then did she remember that she is allergic to bee stings. And she started to panic.
She had heard and read all the warnings about bee stings and anaphylaxis and made it a habit to never go outside in the summer during daytime in order to avoid the possibility of meeting up with a stinging insect that could kill her. As her mind raced, her body acted in slow motion, or more accurately no motion at all. April could see her funeral, she could see how sad her dogs would be without her to bake cookies for them each night and she could see her parents spending her life insurance policy on a combination of cruises and TV infomercials. Her breath was ragged, she was struggling to breathe, it was getting harder and harder to get the air into her lungs, when he boss (known as Dumpy in the coffee room) rounded the corner and stared at her.
“Why are you sitting at your desk sobbing when there’s work to do? That spreadsheet isn’t going to fill itself in with useless numbers, you know.”
April blinked. She realized she couldn’t breathe because she was crying while trying to vocalize her will (she had never written one down), in case anyone was recording her last moments, not because her airway had swelled up. Her hand had hardly swelled from the sting and she removed the stinger, still unable to believe that she had been stung and lived to tell about it. She was definitely going to get a Snickers bar to celebrate her good fortune. Maybe two. And she would definitely make Benadryl part of the daily preventative cocktail- apparently you can never be too careful.
Death sat steaming in the window. Trying to figure out why this woman just could not be killed. The stakes were getting higher and she just would not cooperate. Die already, dammitt! I have things to do- I don’t have all day to spend trying to kill your sorry self. He wished he had the power to speak, maybe if he could explain it to her, she’d let him take her. But alas, in exchange for omnipotence and the power to take life, one had to give up assuming a visible form and the gift of speech.
Death reviewed the options. Are we up to Plan D now? He had almost never had to go to Plan C before, and now he had to think of Plan D? Plan D had better work, as Death, never a good student, wasn’t sure which letter followed D in the alphabet and just might have to give up after this attempt if he couldn’t figure it out.
April sat at her desk, eyes and cheeks still red, but now with chocolate smeared on her chin. She was counting her blessings and swearing to herself that she wouldn’t take anything for granted anymore. She would be a better person. She would stop kicking the homeless guy in front of her house each morning as she headed out. She would stop baiting the neighbor’s cats into her garage so her dogs could play with them. Really she would be a better person with her new lease on life….
To be continued…………………………………..
Copyright Antigone Lett. All rights reserved, etc. etc......
Sunday, November 11, 2007
The Stalker
As the morning light filtered into the room, the shadows in the unlit corners appeared darker still. Eyes still unfocused, April glanced in the direction of the darkest corner and thought she saw the shadows move. She blinked, assuring herself that it was too early and her eyes were playing tricks on her. She looked again and this time saw only the silhouette of the plant hanging from the mantel and the cat-less kitty condo behind it.
In the instant in which she was blinking, the shadow gathered itself up into a little ball and rolled under the door into the bathroom. In the bathroom, the shadow made the arrangements- involving the power cord of the hair dryer and leaking pipes.
You see, today was April’s day to die. Her number had come up, and death was here to claim her. But, death had until midnight to claim her and if he couldn’t claim her by then, she would live forever. Poor April would have no idea that it was her last day on earth. She was but a pawn in the interminable battle between life and death and, like the rest of us, she had no idea how capricious either could be at any given moment.
April dragged herself out of bed, let the dogs out and only then realized that while heading toward the back door with eyes semi-open, she had stepped in, and tracked, some of the Ranier-sized pile of dog vomit that was awaiting her on the oak floor. While she had been known to leave such a mess to: worst case dry out some; and best case to be re-ingested by a hungry dog; a mess like that would surely leave a mark on the wood floor. With a disgusted sigh, she got out the paper towels, swearing all the while.
After the cleanup and much cursing at the dog who felt the need to eat the roll of toilet paper, April took the world’s fastest shower. She noticed the puddle on the floor of the bathroom, just in front of the sink, but didn’t have time to ponder it, or clean it up. She also didn’t have time for the blow dryer either, and thus left the room with dripping wet hair, which she never did. She let the dogs in, swore at them some more as she handed over their treats and ran out the door.
Death couldn’t believe it. All she had to do was turn on the hairdryer and she was his……how could the stupid dogs have foiled his plan. He always went for the easiest way out- it was easiest for the claimee, and also for him. If he claimed her early, he could crank through his list and then, if done before 2PM, he would have had the rest of the afternoon to spend at the beach. He loved the beach and always tried to get his work done early in order to spend a few hours lulled into the blissful nothingness that enveloped him there. That and the smell of salt water, which took him back to happier days and times.
April ran out of the house in a hurry, breakfast would have to be the three saltines that she found shoved down deep in the seat of the passenger seat. Not having children, only dogs, she didn’t want to think about how they got there. The important thing is that they were there and they didn’t break any teeth on the way down.
Death, meanwhile, had to resort to plan B. A car accident- they happen every day, especially in this town. He flew out over the highway, looking for the idea location. There it was, a curve in the road, at the peak of a hill, with traffic backing up for the exit on the blind down-side of the hill. He hated car accidents. They were loud and scary and lot of people were involved in one way or another. Granted he got a bonus for every extra soul that he brought in, but he hated to do it that way. He much preferred either the singular fluke accident that resulted in just the one death, or a large-scale natural disaster to rack up his numbers that couldn’t be foreseen by the victims. He had already spent too much time on April, so car accident it was and he had it all figured out.
April left the house, snarfed down the saltines in the first block and only then realized that she did not have her card-key for the office. Without it, she couldn’t get in the building, couldn’t fire up her computer and most importantly, couldn’t get into the cafeteria for lunch. Crap! She drove around the block and ran back into the house to get it. She lost maybe a minute to her forgetfulness, then was back on the road, speeding to make up for yet more lost time.
Death had it all figured out, a tractor-trailer—the driver distracted as he called a radio station repeatedly on his cell in order to win Huey Lewis concert tickets—would crest the hill on the wet road and see the backlog ahead and slam on the brakes. He would then jackknife, cross all there lanes of traffic, taking out only April as the rig came to rest against April’s squashed car and the median. The concrete median was only fifty feet long of on each side of the highway at the pivotal point, so it had to end there. Outside that fifty foot range and the rig would wind up in the median or in the opposing traffic.
He would begin by going left and sheering along the median until the trailer of the rig joined in the fun, passing the cab, and then, together, they would swerve right across all traffic lanes, ending with a squished April and her 1985 Ford Escort-with no side impact air bags.
Death was waiting for the accident. It was all figured out down to the last second. He had the tractor-trailer in his radar and there was April. But she was in the wrong spot. She was too far behind. Dammit!
He watched her watching the jackknife unfold. Or more accurately watching the jackknife fold. She was in the right hand lane, she was thirty feet behind where he needed her to be. She saw or heard the truck’s distress, sensed that it was in trouble and slowed accordingly. The truck came to rest just a few feet in front of her. She stopped without incident and ran to the cab of the truck, concerned that the driver was hurt. She saw no motion from the truck excepting the lonely wipers continuing their intermittent sweeping of the windshield, unknowing and uncaring that the truck’s forward motion had ended.
As April climbed the steps to the cab, heart racing, unsure of what she would find when she got there, the driver gave her a thumbs-up. She presumed that it meant that he was okay, and never dreamt that he had just scored the Huey Lewis tickets. Death snorted disgustedly, now wishing that he had taken the truck driver out after all. He deserved it. April climbed back in her car and continued on her journey to work, even later than she was five minutes ago but with her heart beating a million miles an hour and the adrenaline flowing.
Death couldn’t believe the dumb luck. It must be April’s lucky day. Too bad she would never know it.
To be continued on Thursday 11/15/07…………………..
Copyright 2007 Antigone Lett. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
In the instant in which she was blinking, the shadow gathered itself up into a little ball and rolled under the door into the bathroom. In the bathroom, the shadow made the arrangements- involving the power cord of the hair dryer and leaking pipes.
You see, today was April’s day to die. Her number had come up, and death was here to claim her. But, death had until midnight to claim her and if he couldn’t claim her by then, she would live forever. Poor April would have no idea that it was her last day on earth. She was but a pawn in the interminable battle between life and death and, like the rest of us, she had no idea how capricious either could be at any given moment.
April dragged herself out of bed, let the dogs out and only then realized that while heading toward the back door with eyes semi-open, she had stepped in, and tracked, some of the Ranier-sized pile of dog vomit that was awaiting her on the oak floor. While she had been known to leave such a mess to: worst case dry out some; and best case to be re-ingested by a hungry dog; a mess like that would surely leave a mark on the wood floor. With a disgusted sigh, she got out the paper towels, swearing all the while.
After the cleanup and much cursing at the dog who felt the need to eat the roll of toilet paper, April took the world’s fastest shower. She noticed the puddle on the floor of the bathroom, just in front of the sink, but didn’t have time to ponder it, or clean it up. She also didn’t have time for the blow dryer either, and thus left the room with dripping wet hair, which she never did. She let the dogs in, swore at them some more as she handed over their treats and ran out the door.
Death couldn’t believe it. All she had to do was turn on the hairdryer and she was his……how could the stupid dogs have foiled his plan. He always went for the easiest way out- it was easiest for the claimee, and also for him. If he claimed her early, he could crank through his list and then, if done before 2PM, he would have had the rest of the afternoon to spend at the beach. He loved the beach and always tried to get his work done early in order to spend a few hours lulled into the blissful nothingness that enveloped him there. That and the smell of salt water, which took him back to happier days and times.
April ran out of the house in a hurry, breakfast would have to be the three saltines that she found shoved down deep in the seat of the passenger seat. Not having children, only dogs, she didn’t want to think about how they got there. The important thing is that they were there and they didn’t break any teeth on the way down.
Death, meanwhile, had to resort to plan B. A car accident- they happen every day, especially in this town. He flew out over the highway, looking for the idea location. There it was, a curve in the road, at the peak of a hill, with traffic backing up for the exit on the blind down-side of the hill. He hated car accidents. They were loud and scary and lot of people were involved in one way or another. Granted he got a bonus for every extra soul that he brought in, but he hated to do it that way. He much preferred either the singular fluke accident that resulted in just the one death, or a large-scale natural disaster to rack up his numbers that couldn’t be foreseen by the victims. He had already spent too much time on April, so car accident it was and he had it all figured out.
April left the house, snarfed down the saltines in the first block and only then realized that she did not have her card-key for the office. Without it, she couldn’t get in the building, couldn’t fire up her computer and most importantly, couldn’t get into the cafeteria for lunch. Crap! She drove around the block and ran back into the house to get it. She lost maybe a minute to her forgetfulness, then was back on the road, speeding to make up for yet more lost time.
Death had it all figured out, a tractor-trailer—the driver distracted as he called a radio station repeatedly on his cell in order to win Huey Lewis concert tickets—would crest the hill on the wet road and see the backlog ahead and slam on the brakes. He would then jackknife, cross all there lanes of traffic, taking out only April as the rig came to rest against April’s squashed car and the median. The concrete median was only fifty feet long of on each side of the highway at the pivotal point, so it had to end there. Outside that fifty foot range and the rig would wind up in the median or in the opposing traffic.
He would begin by going left and sheering along the median until the trailer of the rig joined in the fun, passing the cab, and then, together, they would swerve right across all traffic lanes, ending with a squished April and her 1985 Ford Escort-with no side impact air bags.
Death was waiting for the accident. It was all figured out down to the last second. He had the tractor-trailer in his radar and there was April. But she was in the wrong spot. She was too far behind. Dammit!
He watched her watching the jackknife unfold. Or more accurately watching the jackknife fold. She was in the right hand lane, she was thirty feet behind where he needed her to be. She saw or heard the truck’s distress, sensed that it was in trouble and slowed accordingly. The truck came to rest just a few feet in front of her. She stopped without incident and ran to the cab of the truck, concerned that the driver was hurt. She saw no motion from the truck excepting the lonely wipers continuing their intermittent sweeping of the windshield, unknowing and uncaring that the truck’s forward motion had ended.
As April climbed the steps to the cab, heart racing, unsure of what she would find when she got there, the driver gave her a thumbs-up. She presumed that it meant that he was okay, and never dreamt that he had just scored the Huey Lewis tickets. Death snorted disgustedly, now wishing that he had taken the truck driver out after all. He deserved it. April climbed back in her car and continued on her journey to work, even later than she was five minutes ago but with her heart beating a million miles an hour and the adrenaline flowing.
Death couldn’t believe the dumb luck. It must be April’s lucky day. Too bad she would never know it.
To be continued on Thursday 11/15/07…………………..
Copyright 2007 Antigone Lett. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
