Stella

Jim was walking down the street. He saw a small red object lying in the gutter to his left. Rather than pick it up, he walked straight past it; it's just rubbish, after all. A few steps later, however, he paused and considered that by not picking up the object, he's failing to advance the plot in any kind of interesting way. He continued walking, having dismissed this consideration as ludicrous and unethical.

Jim came upon a pedestrian crossing, stopping to look for cars and think about what a weird phrase 'came upon' is. After ascertaining that the street was clear, he walked boldly onto the old, lumpy rectangles of white paint. He was promptly run over by a Ford Mondeo. When I say 'run over', it was more 'run under', because when a car hits you at relatively high speed, the bonnet is designed at a downward angle, and so your body is levered up into the sky.

Jim woke up in a hospital bed, when I say 'bed' it was more a 'dumpster'. After arriving at the hospital, Jim was examined, whereupon his heart stopped beating for 28 minutes and this is widely agreed upon in the medical profession as 'dead'. Therefore, not wanting to waste any more of the tax payer's money, they disposed of Jim by way of the nearest window, landing him in the aforementioned dumpster.

After hopping out of the dumpster, thinking himself surprisingly uninjured considering he'd been run under by a car and thrown out of a window in the past two hours, Jim saw a nearby park and made his way towards it. Parks are unusual places, filled with laughter and a lot of dog shit. Jim was particularly familiar with this second fact because he'd fallen into a particularly large pile of the stuff. He'd fallen because, despite his original assessment of 'surprisingly uninjured', Jim, in fact, had two broken legs, a shattered pelvis and a dislocated left pinky.

Jim army-crawled to the nearest pedestrian crossing, in what can only be described as a wanton act of masochistic de ja vu. After crawling exactly half way across the crossing, Jim was convincingly run 'over', this time, by me, the author. I was dissatisfied with my previous attempt at ending Jim, having hired a 'hit and run man' to do the job earlier, and so the moral of the story is: 'If you want something done right, write a short story'.


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I would like to dedicate this short story to Latika... for inspiring me... to write it.
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