Falling Up

As we walked on ceaselessly, and seemingly endlessly, we're full of hopelessness and despair, my wife and I, I hear I bird shriek. I divert my gaze from my wife's middle toe, which was unapologetic and longer than her "big" toe.

Naturally, we both look up to see what the bird was bitching about, and there I saw two large sheep falling through the great big sky. The bird was promptly hit by the massive woolen creature and exploded with a cloud of blood and feathers and wool. The sheep had the occasion to land on my traveling companion, my wife with too big a middle toe, or too small a "big" toe.

Upon landing violently and murderously before my feet, two saddlebags open quite gently, spilling countless gems, rubies, crystals and diamonds. The sheep's plunge had made me single and rich. I was curious and beyond grateful for the sheep heroics and I wanted to know more about the descended animals: where did they come from? So I looked up to the point in the sky where I first noticed the rain of flesh and gold and blood and death.

Not far from that point a steep precipice that led to the top of the cliff and walking along it - two men and one more sheep. I, briefly, considered shouting my gratitude to the providers of sheep and riches and bachelorhood, but they were making a good pace and to disturb it would be beyond reprehension. So onward.

I spent much of that afternoon tying my and my dead wife's clothes together, she sure didn't need them anymore, in order to carry the large pile of riches I had just come upon. This endeavor left me in the old holey socks and britches my dead wife neglected to launder for a period of days, the poor dead sodstress. So there we were - one rich man with a hamper's worth of laundry wrapped around more riches than the King of Spain, England and Prussia could slap together, a dead woman, two dead sheep and one extremely dead bird.

I couldn't just leave them there. My wife and I just did a stint shoveling bullshit at a local inn and farm and were notorious and well known from tavern to tavern, and she from brothel to brothel, in towns fifty miles in either direction. No, leaving her there wouldn't do at all, and besides those passing travelers on the cliff above must surely have noticed. Time was essential.

So I hurried along, burying first the bird as it was easiest, followed by the two generous dead sheep, which left only the corpse of my dead ex-wife, the lady with the long middle toe. I was overheated. I ventured to a brook that wasn't far from where I stood. This being spring and the canyon being down river from mountains, the brook that I remembered had turned into a raging water source.

I came upon a land bridge after leaving a series of broken twigs as clues to guide me back to the corpse of my dead wife and her toe. Standing on the bridge I gazed down into the hard-flowing water. It pushed and plowed and forced all the edges from all the rocks underneath until nothing was left of them but a cool smooth surface. It glistened. The water raged. Birds shrieked in the air.

I dipped my toe in the water. The water magnified the image back to me and I quickly took it back. Having filled my jug with nature's cold offerings, I was ready to follow the twigs back to the corpse and toe. It was still there. Three piles of dirt that only I knew hid dead animal, and one pile of dead wife. The sun was descending quickly past the canyon. And the time had come.

I still had no shovel so once again I placed my hands into the dirt and dug. I was considerably weaker than I had been with the sheep and birds - or the ground was more solid here. I plunged into the ground. My fingers bled. My back ached. And the hole was still a bit shallow, but night had fallen in my canyon. So I gathered her dead body into my arms. Cold and lifeless she hung. Her head slung beyond my elbow crotch and there was, sickly, still beauty left in her face, which I kissed gently, then tossed into the shallow hole.

I pushed all the dirt and leaves and tree debris I could find, within a reasonable radius, but no matter what I did still stuck out of the hole and dirt and leaves was a middle toe that was considerably longer than its neighboring "big" toe. So I cut it off.