Bonus

A Short Story

Written By Me on November 24th 1997All rights reserved.

Her Story

As she walked down the corridor and into the last room on the left, at the end of the hall, she heard a distinct noise. Almost like a scraping sound. She hurried into the room and shut the door behind her, thinking that maybe she was hearing the new building she was in "settling" as they say. She sat down at her desk preparing to write a speech about women and family, she knows all about it at very best. She gets up and goes over to the radio which sits upon the window ledge just above that pesky little trash can she keeps meaning to empty. She looks down and sees coffee stains on the many balls of paper she had thrown out the evening before stressing over exactly what she would write about. As she attempts to begin, she clears her throat and takes a deep breath.

Memories upon memories come into her mind like a herd of elephants, she smiles for she can actually imagine a herd of elephants barging through the door just at that very moment. She feels as though if one of them were to slow down for her, she would get up and try her very best to climb up on it's back so it could take her away from all this chaos. They'd go deep into the jungle so she can swing with the monkeys! She laughs out loud now looking around just-in-case.

She thinks of the time she and her husband met. How they met was clearly by accident. She had hit him with her car while trying to hurry for work one morning, well "sort" of hit him.....

He had this great three piece royal blue suit on with matching shoes, which of course got all torn up as soon as his left foot failed to retreat like the rest of his body had done in the most swiftest of seconds. She had just been pulling out of her parking space as quick as she could when he had stepped out from the curb. She looked up just as she had finished tuning in to Hot 97 grooving to yet another Puff Daddy remix of yet another song. As she saw him she screamed, "Ahhhh!" then crunch! She thought she missed him when she saw him back away with a look of pure fright on his very face. His toes on his left foot ended up being in pretty bad shape after that. She had hit the brakes, jumped out of the car, or at least tried to forgetting that she was still wearing her seat belt. She lost her composure and nearly fell out of the car!

" I can't even begin to believe this, are you gonna be all right!?" She asked him. He was all crumpled to the ground holding his foot trying to figure out what shape it was in exactly. He had the look of pain and distress on his face trying not to show that he was suffering too much. He tried to be a man about it but it wasn't working. "I really neeeeed help, please call the ambulance or something, I think you broke every single solitary toe in my foot!" He then made some other comments she could have only have imagined to hear for he sure didn't say them out loud. There was also this crazy looking old lady with white hair all in long exaggerated braids wearing a blue house coat and orange flip flops watching in awe the whole time.

She yelled at her, "Well, keep standing there then, just keep standing there, you know this man needs an ambulance and I just can't leave him here in all this pain!" The lady shouted back, "He wouldn't be in any pain if you had watched where you were going, try using your car phone, it's the closet one around stupid!" and walked away. The lady was right, then she noticed that this old lady was always out there every morning watching everybody anyway, why, she didn't know. She ran back around to her car, got to the phone and called 911. They had to wait 15 minutes before the Ambulance arrived.

He was looking around as they waited, "please, over there" nodding his head towards his briefcase lying ever so still on the pavement right next to him. "Can you be so kind-ow! Ow! Can you please hold on to that for me, please..."O.k. O.K. I got it" she said, as she reached for it. As she did it busted open letting all his important papers fly out and about....as she was ever so nonchalantly looking at the "paper shower" she noticed a business card too. His name was Levi Johnston....she smiled. "Ummm, can you get those papers that are about to fly out of sight for me also? Thank you!" he shouted, his voice growing more and more impatient. He tried retrieving some himself but every time he moved, the pain searing through his foot and up his leg caused him to stop his movements dead in it's tracks.

The ambulance finally came and he let out one big yell as they rushed over to his side, did their routine and took him to Vincent's Hospital to treat him. She visited him after they had finished with him and had put his foot and half of his lower leg in a cast. They talked for a long while. She told him her name, "it's Claudia", he smiled. Something she thought he would never do. "He's got dimples" she thought to herself, "I just love(s) me some dimples" and she smiled right back. She apologized over and over AND over again, then even offered to pay the hospital expense for fear of a lawsuit. He told her, "Don't worry about it, they say that I will live. It was just my three toes, you know, this lil' piggy got roast beef, this lil' piggy got none and this lil' piggy went wee, wee, wee all the way home!" They both laughed but she still felt terrible.

That was 8 years ago. He had asked her out to dinner at the hospital but made her wait 6 months between phone calls and e-mails until they actually set a date to go to "Weasies Chicken & Greasy-Fried Biscuit House" for a splendid feast of chicken, ribs, biscuits, potato salad, cornbread, string beans, sweet potatoes, fried sweet corn, three bean salad, peach cobbler and I'm too tired to say the rest! But they threw down! Got all greasy from them biscuits and everything! Levi even wanted to get a hold of some chitlins and put them in a brown paper bag to take home but the waitress said they were all out. They dated for a year and a half, then they were married on a beautiful May afternoon and honeymooned for two weeks in Hawaii. Their daughter Lorna came a year later and their son Levi came two years thereafter.

She started thinking about how lovely her two children were and how every time Lorna were to get into trouble her father would come right to the rescue. He would come to her defense so much so that on more than one occasion, Claudia had to put them "both" in the time-out corner. He would actually stand right there too, laughing and carrying on. Poor little Levi would just hang around his mother most of the time, staring at them and trying to figure out if he should join them or not. Yup, little Levi was definitely a little mamma's boy! Precious as he was and so well behaved. He hated when anyone would raise their voice in the house. He would run right up to the guilty party and stare up at them with his big brown, expressive eyes as if to say, "don't act angry, show everlasting love". He would be in tears and you could not help but to stop being mad, pick him up and just hold him. Needless to say, Levi, Sr. and Claudia rarely if ever argued and if they had to it would NOT be in front of the children, not even within earshot.

He had always been a very observant child too. She even caught him outside one night once sitting in a lawn chair staring at the starlit sky. She was full of tears and kept telling Levi, Sr. not to call the police until they had looked for him in the yard where he always seemed to be, day or night. But this time it was way past midnight. She had gotten up to go to the bathroom and had noticed his bedroom door wide open where you could see directly across to his bed. He wasn't in his bed and was not in the bathroom either. She quickly headed for Lorna's room, she was safe, her whole little body under the blankets as usual. Claudia thought for a quick moment to at least let her little head out from under them so she could breathe and as Lorna tossed around to her side the sheets let up off her, "good" Claudia said as she turned back around and headed quickly for her own room, "Levi! Levi! wake up" shaking him hard, "little Levi is gone!" tears welled up in her eyes. Levi, Sr. woke up, woke right up with a vengeance! "I'll call the cops" he said without a moments hesitation. "No! Claudia said, he has got to be around here somewhere, he has got to be!" So he got up and followed her through the house and even down into the basement when Claudia finally turned around and said, "how can we get ANYWHERE if you keep following me around!?" "Your right, I will go call the police!" he ran upstairs. In the mean time Claudia went into the back kitchen area near the sliding doors leading out onto the patio. She this time "looked" outside and there he was. She opened the doors, turned her head back around and yelled "Levi, don't call the cops, I found him!" "what!?" he yelled back. "Just come outside!"

As she slid the door open it made a banging noise scaring poor little Levi so bad, he nearly tipped over and fell out the chair. He got up with a little bit of a struggle and turned around, "Mamma!" he screeched. "Levi, what on earth are you doing out here so late like this?" "I almost died not knowing where you were". He told her, " I am just trying to count all the stars", then asked, "the ones that twinkle, is that God making more?" Claudia bent down and hugged him, he still smelled like his father's XS cologne that he insisted on putting on before he went to bed so he could "smell like his daddy". You had us so scared Levi, you must never do this again....please. He looked at her, studied her face and said, "I will never scare you no more" as he then wiped a tear from her eye. Levi, Sr. came outside and little Levi ran to him, stated his apologies, ran into the house and up to his room. Lorna had slept through all the commotion.

Claudia and her tired, crazy-looking husband went back into the house, checked all the doors to make sure things were locked properly and went up to bed. So Claudia decided to write about a woman and her family. It was a speech about love and togetherness, appreciation and patience. She wrote it and read it

like a good book, the kind you would never want to put down. She wrote about the love(s) of her life knowing that she would get a standing ovation. Knowing that what she would write about would cause others to remain close to their families and try to protect them emotionally, physically, lovingly and she would most definitely add....spiritually.