Flying Lessons

This Mortal Coil: Studies Shoe That A Boa Can Sense The Heartbeat Of Its Prey by Mark Ambrose Harris

Sitting in Café Cleo watching glitter fall out of umbrellas and on to The Dead Dolls, I thought “This is how Cinderella must have felt at the ball.”. I didn’t want to miss the end of the night, the best part of the evening, when you get to see how everything plays out, but when the clock struck 12, I was getting closer and closer to missing the last carriage home. My ride wouldn’t turn back into a pumpkin, but I was in danger of missing the last metro. I never wear a watch, it feels like a shackle on my arm, and there’s no place on earth (at least not in Montreal) where you will find yourself unable to find out what time it is. Someone around you always has a cellphone, an ipod or even an actual watch. It fell upon my friend Liz to keep track of time for me, and when I asked her the time for about the 8th time in the last hour, she handed me her cellphone so I could take a look myself. I flipped it open and the first thing my eyes landed on were the words “Don’t Panic.” Taking a page from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, I sat back, relaxed, and enjoyed the show. 

There was a car coming in my direction, I trusted it would stop before it hit me. I was lying in the middle of the street, and all I could do was replay the feeling of my ankle twisting in on itself and the impact of the pavement on my bones. I knew nothing had been broken, but standing was a prospect I couldn’t yet envision. Dragging myself to the sidewalk was my best bet. The woman who had been driving the car rushed to my side, her dyed blonde hair and thick lipstick reminded me of my first grade teacher and how I could always see down her shirt when she would bend over to talk to me. She stayed by my side while the nearby construction worker ran across the street to the fire station to get a first aid kit. The construction worker came back with five firemen who had in turn called an ambulance when they had seen me sprawled in the middle of the street. I lit the cigarette I had been holding, and managed not to break when I fell, and I waited. 

I had taken three different buses to work and still had to walk the last twenty minutes. It was the first time I took this particular route and I was afraid I’d be late. My left foot hurt to walk on, a problem the doctors haven’t quite figured out yet. The building, my destination, was in sight, another fifteen minutes I figured. Waiting to cross the street, I took a smoke out of my purse. Stepping off the sidewalk, I pushed in the child proof mechanism on my lighter and wished someone I love a whole lot of pain. The exact thought running through my mind before I lost my balance, twisted my right ankle and fell face first towards the scorching pavement was “I don’t care if it’s petty and unhealthy, I hope he’s fucking miserable.”