Gravity
When you were small, gravity was nothing, really nothing at all because you
seemed always in the process of ascent, jumping higher, climbing higher, even
when your father hoisted you in his arms so you could touch the early evening
moon, you could just about scrape your fingernails across that yellow ball with
the little bounce he gave you, still you wanted to be taller, stronger, older,
and nothing could stop you, you would live forever without limits, overcoming
even school, slow as it was, and then you settled into a kind of routine, with
a job and then another and then another after that and yet another, and then
emerging out of seemingly nowhere a partner appeared and the weekdays went
shooting past, and weekends nothing at all, and then a handful of gravity-free
little ones who propelled themselves up, growing taller and stronger and older,
at the same time forcing you down a little as they pushed up, and where did the
time go because now the weeks rocketed by, and even important work projects
came and went, so fast that you forgot some of the most important ones, which
were picked up by others who themselves were climbing and driving you down as
they clambered upward, and so much of that occurred that after a while you
longed for a retirement where you could stop doing what you had to do and start
again doing what you really wanted to do (what was that, exactly?), and all at
once it arrived, the big event with cakes and speeches and some tears and envy
mixed in it, too, all streaming by quickly, beginning and ending in one
collapsed breath, and those things you wanted to do were now in front of you
but then behind you because most of them you weren’t able to do any more
anyway, and at last there you went, down, down in a bed in a funny-smelling
white room surrounded by people in white and also by those formerly little ones
and everything started fading and gravity was suddenly kicking in with a
vengeance, pulling you, dragging you, tugging you down, until finally a tiny
black hole appeared and grew larger and you felt yourself sliding into it,
resisting only a little at first, until at last it had you and covered you up.
Jerry
Jerman
Jerry Jerman lives and writes in Norman,
OK. His fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, 50-Word
Stories, and 101-words and his nonfiction in Oklahoma
Humanities.