The Big Fall: 27,575 words

 

I wrote almost 3000 words today. My fingers were flying across the keyboard, and plot was miraculously and effortlessly appearing on the screen in front of me. A unicorn writing day. Two short excerpts.

In the first, finally, the meet cute for the manufactured romance. We find ourselves at the end of a hot yoga class. Yellow Mat is a person, whose ostentatious, over-the-top, attention-grabbing antics in yoga are as loud as the colour of his mat. (Yellow Mat is a real person who is frequently at the same classes as me, with an actual yellow mat)

~~~

I can no longer hear Yellow Mat’s excessively loud breaths. I sit up. I see him rolling up his mat. I knock over my water bottle, my signal to Evelyn to start moving. We picked something that happens commonly enough in class that it will not draw any attention. As Yellow Mat vacates the room, I am pleased to see that he has left behind a pool of sweat surrounding his mat. Again, sweating is normal in a hot yoga class. A pool of sweat even. But everyone else uses their yoga towel to wipe it up, making sure they don’t create a slipping hazard for others. Not Yellow Mat. Not today.

Evelyn gets up, rolls up her mat and slides it under her arm to free up both her hands to carry her yoga blocks and return them to the pile. Moving swiftly, with reckless abandon, she steers herself towards the waiting slick of sweat on the floor.

Here is comes. The Big Fall. 

As her right foot slides in the sweat, she starts to move almost in slow motion. Her arms start to pinwheel gracelessly as she works quickly to try to right herself. The look on her face is abject terror. Her right foot slides several feet across the floor, while her left leg reaches high upwards and forwards, almost a “toppling tree” pose but sideways. As she careens forward, there is a moment where it appears that she may be able to right herself. But it is a brief moment, followed by a spectacular flop backwards landing clumsily on her bottom. In an astonishing feat, she was able to hop up to her feet faster than I would have believed possible whispering a quick “Sorry for the noise everyone, I’m ok,” as the colour rose in her cheeks.

“Evelyn? Evelyn Darkwood? What are you doing here?” came Harper’s voice, exuding emotion.

~~~

And for Jackie, in honour of her terrible flight experience. I hope I have done it justice. In this excerpt, we are on a Stratford-Toronto train.

~~~

He was seated quite close to us. From even before the train left, he was on the phone constantly, engaged in loud business discussions, and I believe at one point he was presenting at a meeting. He did not wear headphones, so we were able to hear both sides of the incredibly boring conversation. This alone was not particularly offensive. There usually is one passenger such as this on every Business Class train car in the world. He was so loud that we couldn’t hear each other speak, so we read or played card games to pass the time. I had thought ahead and brought noise-cancelling headphones, which were a blessing. I did not think to bring my vision-cancelling glasses, so I had a front row seat to him spitting into the menu and then putting it back in the seat pocket. And then running up and down the aisles, waving an American flag shouting “God Bless America” at top volume. I had thought we had already heard top volume during his conference calls, but no. He had untapped reserves. He then moved on to screaming the American national anthem, complete with air guitar. Then a rousing version of God Save the King. The hapless train attendants tried fruitlessly to corral him back to his seat, and back into silence.

And just when I thought it could not possibly get worse, he placed a young baby in the aisle. Presumably his young baby, though I could not be certain. He then shouted for a train attendant to deliver him his sixth Clamato cocktail, and then after shouted vaguely to all other train passengers to watch his baby for him saying “It takes a village, you know!”

Luckily for us all, and perhaps most luckily for the baby, we pulled into Union Station in Toronto a few very long minutes after this last proclamation.