A couple days ago while I was editing a ZenderTalk, the fire squad and an ambulance raced down the street because a nine year-old girl here walked her bicycle across the highway five hundred yards from my office and didn’t see a truck. So the truck cut off her leg and drove three of her fingers up into her hand. The medical people put the leg in a plastic bag. I don’t know what the girl did because I have not been told. By the time the mother got to the scene, her daughter’s leg was already in the plastic bag. The mother fainted (someone told me) because her brain turned away certain oncoming images, sending blood to other body parts unburdened by sensory perception.
I woke up at 2:30 this morning in a sweat of concern about everyone’s spine. I had a bad dream about my son and a chair and a truck and his spine. God surrounded the spinal cords of humans with bone pieces, but the arrangement is hardly good enough. God forgot to pack the world with Styrofoam peanuts. So He made fire trucks and ambulances and plastic bags. And does He ever know how to divert human blood.
Never go back to sleep if you have to be disturbed in the middle of the night. I follow my own advice and get out of bed before much time passes; boiling three eggs is easier than thinking.
I had to kill a spider. He (or she) walked across the edge of the counter while my eggs boiled. It was bad timing for the spider. He or she might have lived to inject venom into the bloodstream of a family member, so I had to choose death over life for the spider. I hastened the death of spider and did not like any of it. I notice that the longer chicken eggs boil, the farther and farther away they get from the lukewarm liquid form they assumed in the uterus of the chicken. Apparently, female chickens have periods once a day. I do not know if the spider had a family. I hope not. The goo of spider life is smashed in a napkin right now. The goo had life in it (or was life), but now it does not.
The girl is in stable condition. There will be no funeral this week; the funeral men can wear their casual shoes today. The girl lost the bottom half of one leg; the leg cannot be reattached, so I guess they’ll throw it away, with or without the shoe and sock. I am going to walk down the road now and take a photograph of where the girl lay in the road bleeding to death before God sent the paramedics. I think it was also around this area where the mother fainted. You will be able to see the skid marks. The road will be bathed in morning light because I look out my window now and the new sun looks orange. The truck driver said that he would never drive a truck again. The old man who first cradled the little girl’s head walked away with blood all over him. Human blood is similar in consistency to the brown goo of spiders. The man has yet to walk across the edge of God’s counter, but his wife died twelve years ago. The spider, unfortunately, died this morning.
Many women in this world have ceased ovulating, lucky them.
© 2006 by Martin Zender
