“Well,” thought Phil, as he plummeted toward his imminent, sidewalk-splattered doom, “this is it.”
“Thrown off a faux French monument in the middle of a city in the middle of a desert in the middle of the night,” he continued thinking, “by a newly re-deified deity intent on scorching the Earth for as mercurial and ill-defined a reason as revenge.
“Honestly, I did not see it coming.”
Phil continued plummeting.
“It really is beautiful, though. The night, the city. Even the burning prostitutes. Their panic and continued flailing seem almost choreographed. It’s majestic, in its own way. If only I had noticed earlier. Well, not the hookers, per se, but the… beauty inherent in everything. I know I wanted to, but I was trying so hard to get others to think of me the way I wanted to be thought of, trying so hard to make them believe that I could see the angels in everyone, that I completely failed to actually see them. I suppose wanting to be something isn’t the same as actually being something. It’s remarkably simple, really, astoundingly… apt, then, that by simply not trying, by not overanalyzing the approach, that by, quite literally and unfortunately, falling into it, I’m now able to accomplish the task.”
Phil sighed deeply and continued his fall. He began ruminating on, and, for once, truly appreciating, the beauty of everything he could see from his peculiar vantage point: the neon-lit sky, the latticework rushing past him, the ever-approaching sidewalk.
Really, the sidewalk was quite lovely. Laid out in perfect lines, each square clean and unbroken. A kind of whitish-grey, with a stucco-like facing. A stucco-like facing Phil’s face was rapidly nearing.
“Oh, sweet fucking fucking fucking fuck.”
Phil tried to turn his body in mid-air, only getting as far as changing his jackknife into a belly-flop. He continued the metaphor by hooking his arms and attempting to swim himself out of danger.
It didn’t help.
“I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die”
That didn’t really help either.
“Sweet merciful crap, I wish I believed in a god. Or that there were gods to believe in to begin with. Other than the one who just killed me, I mean. If only… Oh shit, sidewalk!”
Phil curled up as best he could and shielded his face from the oncoming ground.