Thursday, August 11, 2022

A Prescription from the Heavens (literary--flash fiction)

Originally Published in Short Short: The Journal of Micro-Fiction
Copyright William Hammett 2012, 2015, 2022
All Rights Reserved


Norma Whitehead of Surrey, England was obsessive-compulsive.  She was compelled to touch every doorknob she passed.  She was equally compelled to wash her hands after touching each of the knobs.  She daily checked every picture in her home to make sure it was straight since passing trucks on the street had a tendency to shake the house a bit.  She couldn't pass a table without swiping her index finger along its edge to make sure that it was free of dust.  For Norma, life was comprised of an endless series of chores consisting of maintaining order, balance, and equilibrium in her universe.  Her husband Henry suggested that she take Prozac, but Norma didn't want chemicals sluicing through her veins.  Besides, she didn't mind the disorder.  She felt that more people needed to pay attention to the smaller things in life.

Norma and Henry were sitting and watching television on a Tuesday evening when her life changed forever.  The couple sat on their living room couch, which was exactly ten-feet-five-inches away from the TV screen since she'd read an article in the Guardian that claimed this was the perfect distance to avoid harmful radiation from the TV's cathode ray tube.  It was also the perfect distance to maintain proper eye health.  Sitting too close to the screen exposed the eye to far too much brightness.  Sitting too far away caused eye strain.

The event sounded like a small explosion.  There was smoke and debris, and Norma and Henry climbed from the floor to see a gaping hole above them.  A small meteorite had slammed through the roof and ceiling and knocked Norma unconscious for a full minute.  She seemed perfectly fine, however, when the neighbors showed up at the front door to see what all the fuss was about.

"It's nothing," Norma explained as she picked up broken objects from the living room floor.  "Just a meteorite."

Henry was perplexed.  Norma was handling the debris--there was a lot of powder and dirt on the floor--without worrying about getting her hands dirty.  From that night on, she lived a life free of OCD.  A doctor subsequently told her that the knock on her noggin had changed the electrical currents in her brain, which had, for all intents and purposes, been cosmically rewired.  The meteorite had been a prescription from heaven.

Norma also had a changed mindset.  If one couldn't guard against something as dramatic as being hit by a meteorite--what were the odds?--there wasn't much reason to worry about things a lot less important, like whether pictures are plumb or tables are free of dust.  "Life just has to happen," Norma told a local reporter.  "You've got to go with the flow.  As Hamlet said, there's providence in the fall of a sparrow.  Or a meteorite."

~William Hammett


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