Authors Note
Chapter Four spoke
to me as one solider ran out from his cover to assist another man in putting on
his gas mask. For no personal reason did he feel the need to help this man- but
he felt the urge, the need, and the sense of liberating certainty in performing
this act of kindness. My short story highlights the concept projected here with
the random act of kindness this man feels through impulse, just as a solider
would do for another.
Droppings
shoot at the dashboard like bullets. White clouds pan out as far as the eye can
see- how amazing that I keep straight. *The cars disappear, they are invisible,
dissolved, eaten by the storm. Faded red lights- those are what I follow. Faded
lights and tire tracks. Inching, as slowly as possible. My eyes glued
themselves to the road, monitoring the tracks of the man in front of me. As I
felt my car vibrate under my feet and shake uneasily I swerve my wheels to the
left and look back for the lights. But I saw different lights now. They were
faded too, but these ones blinked, and they were farther away, and they were
downward. As I came about realizing that the tracks that so almost lead me to
the hole had veered off of its original path, a saw a man; in my side mirror I saw
a man, in the ditch- that’s when I stopped. I may never see this man after today,
but for his own sake, neither may his family.
People ask me why I stopped. The
worst blizzard of the year attacked my body as it tossed me around in the air
and pelted my fact with hail, and I stopped. Why would I do such a thing? Risk my safety? Risk my life- for a man whom I do not even know?
Why so many questions? Where is the
level of confusion upon my gesture? Not a second went by in my mind that
questioned my assistance to this man. I very well could have been in the same
position as him, with no help to my name just the same. The grace of my aid
accounted as more or less of a facilitate to him, but as for me, it was, as you
say, all in a day’s work.
*The
wood vanishes, it is pounded, crushed, torn into pieces.
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