Part 1
The car crash was sudden, as car crashes are usually wont to do. Nobody in their right mind expects a car crash, and those that do tend to have some sort of feeling of obligation towards whatever grandiose daydream they’d been obsessing over, but for the most part, nobody expects a car crash.
I, for one, was not expecting a car crash. I was not expecting a car to come careening around the corner of the usually quiet, mundane and all too boring suburb where all the lawns look the same and all the neighbors around me feel some sort of inherent jealousy towards the other, using their free time to work out what small things they could do to trump the last thing done to show off..something. It’s all very petty.
However, that’s what I’ve grown accustomed to here in the suburb where I’ve decided to take up residence, aside from that, it’s quiet, it’s mundane, it’s routine.
So I definitely was not expecting to find a car careening down my street and straight for me on my walk to the mailbox to see if the paper had arrived while all of my neighbors stood on their porches staring at me as if this was somehow my fault. All this I caught in the slow-motion, aerial view, as I spun three-sixty in an attempt to dodge the oncoming car.
Landing on my left wrist, and bruising my knee, the first thought that came to me was that if I was a jogger, I wouldn’t be jogging for at least a couple days, maybe a week with the way I landed on it, I could feel it begin to swell.
However, I’m not a jogger, and I thank the powers that be for that, while also cursing those same powers under my breath.
“Hey man, that’s kinda rude.”
Surprised, I look up, none of my neighbors ever talk to me like that, none of my neighbors talk to me at all, knowing their voices well enough from listening to them drone on to one another, I knew immediately it wasn’t one of them.
“Excuse me?” My own, quick-witted response.
“I said, that’s kinda rude.”
Standing there in front of me, was a …jogger. Not just any jogger though, he wore a tracksuit, one so brightly colored it could have come straight from the ’80s, I’m talking blue, on orange, on red with those awful geometric shapes. His hair was long, light brown, pulled back into a low ponytail and he was wearing plastic lime green sunglasses. He just stood there, staring down at me. I stared back at him, and for several, uncomfortable seconds we just stared at each other saying nothing.
“Shouldn’t do that, yanno.” He finally said, breaking the silence, “it’s rude, could offend someone that doesn’t like being offended.”
I kept staring I had no idea what he was talking about, and like a real smart dude I repeated, “Excuse me?”
He sighed, one of those irritated sighs that people who think they’re smarter than you sigh when they feel like they have to put everything into Layman’s Terms, he even had the gall to reach up and rub his temples like he was the one who just almost died before saying, “Cursing that way, you could offend someone who doesn’t like being offended.” He reached thumb and forefinger up under the sunglasses, pinching the bridge of his nose.
Now, I’m a really smart guy, I’ve been to college and passed all my classes with nothing lower than a B, and I put that to really good use by replying, “Oh.”
To be fair, I did almost get hit by a car, it was about five feet away from where I was sitting and was not something I had planned for six o’clock in the morning with my cup of coffee which was now laying in my lawn, soaked up by the grass which probably enjoyed the half-hour caffeine boost.
“Anyways,” the guy said, “My name is Hermes, but all my buddies call me Henry, and,” he pulled a tablet out of somewhere, I’m not sure where considering he had no pockets to hold one and wasn’t wearing a backpack or anything, “Looks like you’re the guy I was sent to find.”
