‘But if you push it off a cliff, it stays in the air, doesn’t it?’.
I didn’t know what I was doing at this workshop, of all I could have chosen to go to. I’d signed up for mushroom foraging, which was cancelled because the old women who had promised to host the event had taken poorly with poisoning, and the last anyone saw of her, she was climbing the thousand year old oak that no one liked to climb because of where it might lead to. Around these parts we all had an agreement that the elders could do what they please, and so no one tried to bring her down, which made me feel awfully happy.
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I watched Angela touch it with her fingertips. It gave a little, like the way a sponge cake does when it is fresh from the oven, and then twisted away from her. I knew how it felt. One did not like to be poked by Angela, even on a good day, when one was in the mood to be touched.
The clever thing shimmered slightly and then promptly turned the colour of her nail varnish, bright red, with spots. Like a flyagaric fungi, or the umbrella that Reginald sheltered me under the year it rained so much that everyone’s hands turned prune like and they had to call off the Rain Making classes because the apprentices could not master turning off the clouds.
‘Which cliff?’ I asked Angela, but it was too late, because the orb had entered me, and much to my surprise, it was me that was falling off the cliff. Stay in the air, my ass. They had not warned us of this in the flyers, I thought, as I went a-tumblin’.
When I came to, there I was, sunk into the floral sofa and awkwardly nestled between Reg's rotund aunt, who guffawed unnecessary at his banal jokes, and his mother, who looked at him as murderously as I must have, back then. Of all the memories I could have tumbled into, this was the worst. It’s funny that the people you try to forget the most are the ones that you cannot help but remember.
‘Speaking with these inspiring ladies reminds me of one of my favourite quotes’. He paused, sucking on that darn awful pipe he inherited from his great uncle and his right elbow pressing against the mantlepiece. The ladies were the three sisters who lived o'er the way, over which he relentlessly swooned over, despite being married to me for nigh on a decade. They smiled at him politely, sister one's eyelashes impossibly long and the youngest with her impossible waist. I knew what his favourite quote was. It involved an Indian boy and a goat, and was attributed to a scholar who was chased out of the university some years before for a terrible incident with the headmistresses daughter. Please don’t say it, I implored him silently. I might just scream.
I moved my gaze from his face, which I wanted to glass, to the frayed edges of his sweater. Perhaps, I thought, I could reach out and unravel the thread, untying the knots that held him together so that he would cease to exist. It would not be the first husband I unravelled, and the horror of that was something I tried best to forget. But a girl does have her powers, which are hard to rein even with both hands on the ropes and heels dug firm.
It was then the earth began to rumble, so much so that the sofa moved fast toward the windows, and whiskey edged liked madness toward the edge of the sill, and the burning logs rolled out of the fireplace onto the carpet, and in my mind, I was crowing: ‘at last, at last, at last’.
On my hands and knees as the floor shook, I moved toward the kitchen, ignoring him as he screamed beneath the bricks of the fire place which had toppled upon him as the quake continued. I could feel the thing inside me threatening to toss me off the second cliff, the one cliff you want to avoid if you’re falling into the memories you’ve been trying to repress your whole life. I felt like an egg, wobbly inside, gelatinous. My skin was white, covered in ash and crumbled mortar.
Here I go, I thought, toppling off the second cliff. Here I go.
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The egg broke on the floor. I was aware the egg was me, that I had been trying to hatch for some time, and I had finally done so. My insides were spilling out over the linoleum. I looked toward the window, and the tree, where the old woman there, waving at me from the branches.
But she could do nought to help me. I had things to remember that I didn't want to remember. Damn you, Angela, I thought.
That's the last time you talk me into one of these things.
Oh my goodness, that was a hilarious freewrite, 
With Love,
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