/yesod

Tag: falling

  • a fall

    When I get home after work, my youngest daughter meets me at the door. I’m late and phoned ahead to say they should start dinner without me.

    A plate of half-eaten food waits at my wife’s place at the same able. But she is nowhere to be seen.

    “Mama went upstairs,” our daughter tells me.

    After a few minutes, my wife comes downstairs. She takes me aside.

    “Just before you came home, there was this huge crash from upstairs. But it wasn’t like the knocking from before. It was like someone just dumped an armful of books onto the floor right overhead. And it was fucking loud. ”

    She is rattled, just a bit. I wait for her to go on.

    “I went up and Vincent” — that’s one of our cats — “Was sitting on our bed, frozen. His eyes were fucking huge.”

    She couldn’t find anything out of place in our room, nothing to explain the noise.

    I go up to check and, yeah, there’s nothing.

    Later, she notices that a framed photo on a high shelf behind our bed is laying flat on its face.

    It’s a photo of the two of us.

  • the floating eye

    …and I have no breath to scream as my daughter falls twenty feet to the hard concrete floor, a gasp pressing out of my as I run to pick up her tiny, limp body.

    “Oh god, her eyes…”

    I turn away hiding her face from my wife so she cannot see how our daughter’s right eye has become detached and is floating freely between one socket and then other as she tilts her head, a dreamy smile on her face.

    It is horrible to see. It is my fault.

    So horrible that, later that day, I decline to tell my wife the particulars of my dream. I want to spare her the horrors of that image, the drifting float of our child’s eye.

  • payroll

    …I find that I have overslept and am in a rush to get a stack of deposits to the University’s bank by noon, otherwise all of the faculty and staff paychecks will bounce.

    The deposit is a stack of checks and slips totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are pink and yellow carbon copies, very slippery to keep in order. I leave the darkened school library — exhausted students sprawl here and there across chairs and couches, utterly done in by finals and the drunken afterglow parties.

    I pass through a maze of corridors and stairwells, time slipping away. Once I get out to the parking lot, I see a few professors heading to their cars. Everyone wants to get to the bank before noon. It closes early on the weekends, of course.

    Running out of time, I try to flag down one of the faculty but they do not see me. I end up running through the surrounding office park, cutting between buildings and scrambling over landscaping.

    Arriving at the bank, I see the tellers inside beginning to pack up for the day. I bang on the door but they wave me off, mouthing “we’re closed.”

    Somehow I manage to climb up to a small skylight and, quite suddenly, burst through to the floor below in a shower of glass.

    But, after all that, I make the deposit in time.