Maybe it was some sort of performance. If so, it should have been enacted at one of the bandshells where musicians and acrobats on rollerskates did their stuff before crowds that tossed change and sometimes bills into hats or open guitar cases. This was none of that.
Being a Sunday, late summer afternoon, many were milling about. There was strong potential for an audience. From a bench a few hundred yards from the stone terrace overlooking Bethesda, a man stood suddenly in a manner that caught a bit of attention. He was dressed crisply, perhaps emulating one of those eras when starched collars and pocket watches on gold-link chains tucked into vest pockets defined something. And he was fit, as if he’d recently celebrated his fortieth birthday by running a marathon. A few looked on as if something were about to occur. But before anyone could make assessment, the gentleman flung out his arms in a traditional calisthenics pose then snapped forward so swiftly that his spine didn’t follow, instead burst through the back of his neck and torso and anachronistic wardrobe to remain there, rigid as an unflagged flagpole. Then, as the flesh and meat and those anachronistic clothes collapsed to a puddle over his beige patent leather shoes, the spinal column splintered from the top, cracked open with a great crackling, just what one would expect to hear. In four unbroken pieces it ventilated like the rarest flower that ever bloomed until all that remained upright was the spinal chord itself, a delicate yellow stalk fixed in the Sunday breeze. It was hardly there at all, and then it wasn’t. Even that fell with a thread’s spiral into the heap passersbys navigated around without becoming upset.
A brittle old woman turned from the sight to the adolescent girl slouched on the bench beside her and said, That’ll happen to you if you don’t learn to sit straight. The girl sprayed a passing nun with perfume.
Adam Falik is a writer of fiction, drama, and cultural criticism. His fiction publications include The Los Angeles Review, Hobart, and The Bitter Oleander. He has written and produced several plays including the opera ee me and pollock thee, a fictional account of Jackson Pollock and E. E. Cummings, which was nominated for a Big Easy Award. He is an Assistant Professor at Southern University at New Orleans. Please write to him often at adamfalik.com.
