Sunday, March 30, 2008

Prompt fromCornflower: "She was an ordinary sort of woman living an ordinary sort of life."


She was an ordinary sort of woman living an ordinary sort of life. Every morning she got up and made the bed. She’d go into the kitchen and make the coffee. After she’d poured herself a cup, her first cup, she’d take two sips and go and take a shower. She should just pour it out then, you’d think after 20 odd years of the same routine she would but not. She’d leave the cup on the counter. When she’d come back from her shower her coffee would be cold, so she would pour it out and make another cup.
She did the laundry and the dishes, ran the sweeper and cleaned the bathroom, paid the bills and worked in the yard. The ordinary things that women do in their daily lives, tending to home and hearth and family. No grand adventures, no glamorous parties, nothing really to take note of. Nothing really except for, perhaps, the occasional sky diving, parasailing, hang gliding and bungee jumping.
Her family didn’t know about any of it, they would have been most surprised to find out. After all, honestly, she was just an ordinary woman. It had all started one afternoon when she couldn’t stand to iron one more shirt. She’d looked at the pile of laundry sitting in the corner, smelled the roast cooking in the crockpot, saw the dirty glasses in the sink and thought she would just jump off the roof. That’s where it began. She decided that if she was going to jump off a roof, she may as well jump off a bridge and so she drove the 47 miles to Brighton’s Point. She paid the man $150, usually its only $125 for two jumps but she hadn’t made reservations and she wasn’t about to quibble over it. She jumped off the bridge not once but twice and felt more alive then she had in 20 years.
That night at dinner the kids talked about school, David talked about work and she smiled and nodded and never said a word about her leap. Thus began the secret adventures of this ordinary housewife. She was careful, very careful to always pay in cash and to throw away any and all receipts. There was no record anywhere of her little excursions “off the deep end.”

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