Painting the Walls Pink
For my birthday, my boyfriend bought me a pink bicycle helmet. The helmet was sporty enough for me to feel like a real bicyclist, and girly enough for me to feel treasured, protected and cared for.
Our bike ride that early spring afternoon, through the bike trails of inner-city Milwaukee, was everything that a bike ride should be: quiet and sunny with a bit of magic between leaves of the trees casting their shade on the trail playing with the sunlight in the sky. I think I may have seen one or two fairies.
***
I lay dying, thinking about all of the things that I should have done that day. I suppose most people see their lives flashing before their eyes, but me, ever the worrier, thought about the laundry I left in the washing machine that my roommate was going to have to take care of, wondered if I had deleted the spanking fiction sites I had read from my Google history, and thanked God that my mother told me to wear clean underwear just in case I had gotten in an accident. I had, so that was good.
Death: the bright light and so on.
***
Three days after Casey broke up with me, I stopped playing stalker-girl and started taking showers three to four times a day. I lost about fifteen pounds since the thought of food made me nauseated. My friends, Cynthia and Aaron, newly engaged, let me sleep on their couch and somehow avoided physical contact with each other all weekend. Then I went home where my mom read to me and took me shopping and told me to be forgiving.
And made sure that I wore clean underwear.
***
The car that hit me was red. I know this because red was my favorite color. Also, Casey’s car was red. I thought maybe Casey had run me over, but I found out later, in Heaven, that I was wrong. It was a young woman, my age, actually. 27.
***
I suppose most people who break up with each other keep a break up box. I couldn’t. I made my roommate pack up all of Casey’s old stuff and put it on the porch for him to pick up. He was always trying to give me things: A set of bookshelves for Valentines Day picked up at a local Goodwill, his mom’s old TV, a book that he really enjoyed given to him for a birthday by one of his friends. A weird thing: The stuffed carcass of his dead cat. He said it made the ambience really speak to the nature theme I had going on in my living room.
My living room was painted red.
***
So, the bike helmet was in the box o’ things packed up and returned to Casey after we broke up. A smart person probably would have thought “safety first”, as Target always reminds their employees (hey, you have to do something after graduating college with an English degree), and purchased a new bike helmet. But I wasn’t smart. Or rather, I was, but I was also lazy and had never had a fatal, head-crushing accident in my entire bike-riding career, so who cared? I had on my clean underwear.
***
The attending paramedics pronounced me dead-on-scene.
***
Casey attended my funeral wearing the same watch that he wore to his dead father’s funeral. He brought his new girlfriend.
***
My parents weren’t going to press charges against the young woman. Why ruin two lives? But when Nextel demanded that someone continue to pay my contract, they needed something to cover the extra $100 a month, so they went for a civil lawsuit.
***
The new owner, Casey’s new girlfriend (Casey had told her about this great place he knew about not too far from his place), painted her living room white.
The red had penetrated too deep, though.
The walls stayed pink.
Sarah Joy Freese’s previous publications include Prick of the Spindle. She does not have a zombie contingency plan. For more of Sarah’s writing and a review of many of her favorite writers please see: http://iheartya.wordpress.com.