I’ll never forget that night. It was raining. Pouring. I remember that because my wife said she could hear the sawing roar of my snores even over the pounding of the rain on our roof.
And I’ll never forget that night because it’s the night things changed for me. Forever. Permanently.
I thought it was a simple bump on the head. Just one of those things that happens. You go about your day, you sit in a chair, you walk from this part of the house to that other part, you open a door. Once in a while you bump your head.
But this, this was different. If only I’d known that a bump on the head would be what changed my life forever, inexorably. If only I’d known. I would have spent the night running through the field behind the house where I grew up. Even though I was far too old, I would have leaped over the ditch and grabbed onto the tall grass on the other side, feeling its reedy edges slice into my palms. I would have done everything until I couldn’t do anything anymore.
If only I’d known that when the morning came, I wouldn’t be getting up.
~
We hired a young man to look after the animals. Simple thing, really. All he really needed to do was blow a horn if things started going cockeyed.
But curiously enough, every time there was trouble he was nowhere to be found. We looked high and low, but he vanished.
Or so I thought until I heard a soft whimpering emanating from underneath the haystack.
~
It’s a day we’ll never forget. The bridge, London Bridge, fell down. The cars on top fell down. Down down down. Into the icy waters. The people in the cars fell down. Down down down. Into the waters as well, out of the air that kept them alive and into the water.
We fell with them too. We fell into the water. We scratched at door handles. We closed our eyes against the pain of lungs pulling at the same stale breath far too long. We beat our fists upon the same glass, just from opposite sides.