part iv, or in other words, intravenous

because you'll wish you were sedated while reading more of my fiction/autobiography


BLESSED ARE YE WHO ENDURE THESE EXERCISES IN ABSURDITY


Heaven was hard to pin down. Pince spent a lot of time kayaking by herself, sometimes right down the middle of rivers and lakes, but other times near the shoreline, finding interesting spots to dock and hike up the mountainside learning what plants and vistas could be found there. It was another way to enjoy her time in between meeting lots of people who were lovely but not anybody she could consider a close friend. Once she was able to spend an afternoon with her cousin. He asked her how she spent her free time, by reading? Yes, a lot of reading, she said. Her kayak was her traveling library, a different book every day in the front cubby.


She only spent the afternoon with her cousin because she hadn't quite figured out the way and spirit of heaven. It was a lot like earth but was nothing like it. She was still herself with all her strengths and weaknesses which seemed to limit her ability to function in heaven. This meant she was having trouble spending time with people she already knew and cared about. Pince would find a dear friend and would immediately start drifting away as if space was expanding between them pushing them apart.


So this evening she was kayaking on a lake up in the mountains when she saw something kind of funny. It was a grey fin sticking above the water. She knew there were trout and bull fish in the lake, she'd been living in a house boat eating fresh trout twice a week for three months. But this was a large fin, sticking straight up and heading towards her.


Keep in mind that this is a freshwater lake. It was formed by a sudden something or other happening which left an ice cold, clear lake with a petrified forest floor. So Pince could see as the fin got closer that it was attached to a shark the size of ten men. This seemed impossible. She tucked her oar in, rubbed her eyes, looked again and there, five feet and closing in was a shark. BAM! it rammed her feeble kayak. BAM! it rammed again. Pince didn't like the way this was going, she had to do something. Maybe the shark liked to read, she tossed her bookmark aside and read aloud, "GIVE ME TRUTHS, FOR I AM WEARY OF THE SURFACES!!!" BAM the shark rammed again. Maybe the shark didn't like Emerson but there were other poets in the book so she threw it at the shark. BAM!


She offered her dried cherries but that only seemed to upset the shark more. In desperation she picked up her bookmark which looked like this:

and with a quick jab gave the shark a paper cut. Wounded, he swam home but called over his shoulder, "I'LL BE BACK FOR YOU!"


Pince went home and watched Jaws.