I really can't say how it came to be, but I woke up with a helluva headache and a pain in my back.
Maybe, just maybe, it had to do with that fifth of tequila with a nasty tasting worm at the bottom of its bottle... and some of mygood friends who left me deposited on my doorstep.
I don't know. But what I do know is that when I went into the bathroom with my hand mirror and tried to focus on my back, there was a smudgy footprint across the back of my best white blouse!
"Holy S**T!", I growled.
Well, I just wanted to spit! I was so pissed; I thought my head might explode! I began to see shooting stars dancing in my line of sight. Man, I had to calm down!
I began to talk to myself as I have done in the past at times and I said: "Pearly, you did this to yourself, girl." Yeppers, that was the truth. As you could imagine, this was not the first time this girl had awoken to an unwanted surprise.
No, I had to admit, I did this to myself. I made my mind up then and there, that there was gonna come a change in this thirty year old's life, beginning today, by God!
Speaking of God, I began to pray and I said, "Lord, you got to help me turn this old life around." Well I knew, "God helps those who help themselves", right? So, I started helping.
I started slowly, making small changes here and there, beginning with the drinking. I substituted a six pack of Bud Light for the fifth of hard alcohol that very first night! I was rolling now!
By month two, I was down to just one beer a night. And I was starting to work out!
Oh yeah, I thought those veins in the side of my head would pop when I tried to do those first pull-ups. But just the thought of that first try kept me from eatin' that second piece of pee-can pie. I figured that if I weighed a bit less, it would be a "bit" easier to pull my weight up. Smart, huh?
I amazed myself.
Soon, I had some different friends and a whole new job, too. I began to save my money until I had a big old sack of it and decided I needed to buy a safe to store it in, not trusting the banks, you know. By now, I was substituting coffee for that beer at night too. Things were finally going my way.
Then one day I ran into an old friend, Jon.
I was so glad to see him and to be able to tell him my success story. He even invited me for a drink to celebrate!
(Ha! I bet you thought I was gonna fall for that temptation and ‘blow’ all my good fortune, right there, huh?)
Well I said “No, but I would love a cup of coffee and to catch up.” And that’s what we were gonna do.
Now, at this point, I should tell you that, yes, I did give a thought to the rumors going around about my old friend “Jon”.
You see, I had heard that he had some bad mojo going on around him. It seemed that friends and especially the characters in his stories had a bad knack of “going missing”, you know, as in dead.
Well, it is probably because I was so glad to see him, that I just ignored this particular information. And he really did seem harmless. I knew that old girl, Trish, he’d been hanging with the past few years was doing ok. “What could go wrong?”, I thought.
So, we started down the street towards the coffee shop. All of a sudden, a slight drizzle turned into a full blown thunderstorm! It began to pour down sheets of rain.
Being the gentleman I always thought him to be, Jon handed me his big old golf umbrella… the one with the heavy duty metal shaft…
Uh-oh.
It happened so quickly (literally), that I didn’t know what hit me. A bolt of lightning came down from the heavens, I swear to God, and zapped this old girl!
Well, you’ll be glad to know my good buddy, Jon, survived.
Sadly, I was not so lucky, and I am now residing at #88 in “Restful Havens” cemetery, in my old home town.
I heard it was a lovely funeral, with all my friends attending. Even Jon and Trish attended, along with Elaine, Pearly’s sister.
Big sigh
I’d like to tell you there is a great moral to this little tale, but I’m not quite bright enough to figure it out.
Maybe something about picking your friends, or the perils of abstinence, or even using umbrellas in a thunderstorm!?
Perhaps, old Jon can figure it out, maybe even write a story about it. (You can bet someone will die!)
Me? I’ll be tending to my new job, ‘pushing up daisies’, so to speak.
This is my entry for week 12 of @goodguygreg's Story Cubes Contest. I used all the cubes, almost in the order they are given. I think most of them were almost literal except for the turtle who was my symbol for "starting slowly".
My apologies to @jonknight for using him as a character in my story. It's been said that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask permission...I dunno...I heard it somewhere. :)