7th
Something I wrote
Angeline bolted upright in the old kitchen chair as the sensation shot through her like lightning. She wouldn’t notice until the current
crisis had past that she had smacked the back of her skull on the old chair pretty hard. The peak of the ancient slab of wood had
lodged for a split second into the soft tissue between the bottom of her head and the top of her neck and would no doubt be blue
tomorrow. Of course no one would see this discoloration as the area in question is covered by strawberry blond, terribly stringy
hair. A little further north from the soon-to-bruise area lay the current crisis. It was a small, hard entity, moving frantically within the
part of Angeline’s hair.
Angeline is terrified of spiders. She experiences an uncomfortable tinge with the mere mention of anything that has more than four
legs. The manner in which this particular crawley beast was thrashing about made Angeline feel as though the creature had two
thousand legs. After escaping the chair, the teenage girl made every effort to remove the small creature from the top of her head.
Unfortunately, the fact that her hooded sweatshirt and brassiere had recently been pulled up to the top of her chest effectively
prevented her from raising her arms above her shoulders.
And there she stood. Trapped. A demon-possessed arachnid was now surely drilling into her skull. Her entire torso was exposed.
This was an emergency situation that called for drastic measures. There would be no calm pulling down of the shirt and then
reaching up for the bug. This situation called for flailing…and lots of it.
What happened next could only be described as something similar to a “crack seizure”. Angeline threw her head back and forth in
an effort to catapult the insect from her hair. She tried to scare it away by screaming. Somewhere deep in her subconscious,
Angeline wondered if the animal could hear her as tarantulas did not, according to her recollection, have ears. Finally, she attempted
to help the catapult process along further by bending back and forth at the waist in a violent motion. Throughout this entire process,
three things remained constant: first, Angeline’s arms appeared to be frozen in the helpless position of elevated to shoulder height
and bent slightly at the elbow; second, whatever was in her hair was not leaving; and finally, the poor unfortunate girl’s exposed
breasts attempted to defy gravity by rolling and shaking in tandem with her insect-removal efforts.
Somewhere near the point where one couldn’t feel any worse for poor Angeline, large footsteps rushing to her aid become audible.
A large figure appears in the background and heads toward Angeline at about the same time that her efforts to remove the potential
parasite are immediately and violently halted by her mother’s portable microwave stand that had been recently purchased at Home
Depot for $129.00. With impressive speed, Angeline’s body becomes lifeless and collapses to the ground.
Angeline’s father arrived on the scene in response to his little girl’s screams thinking she had been bitten by the neighbor’s rabid
dog. When he looked down and saw his unconscious daughter on the linoleum floor - a small amount of blood running from her nose,
her sweatshirt up around her head and about a quarter of a saltine cracker stuck in the part of her hair, he could do nothing but
shake his head and shut off the webcam.
After a few minutes of head shaking he gingerly pulled Angeline’s sweatshirt down, picked her up and threw her over his shoulder
and began the trip upstairs to her room, cursing his mother and the goddamned nosy librarian that taught her how to use a
computer, and wondering what was going to come of all this…
