A Beginner's Guide to Free Fall

by Andy Abramowitz

with sagging cheeks seated beside his frail wife, bony hand in bony hand. The sight of these people, who must have trudged together across the years, who’d aged to the point where they couldn’t age much more, awakened within Molly an alarming truth that somehow had never before hit her with such inevitability: one day she was going to come to a hospital like this one and her life would end. There would be something wrong with her heart or she’d have cancer of something important, and in one unceremonious moment, in a room so antiseptically bright and sterile that there’d be nowhere for her fear to burrow, she’d be carried out of this world for all of time. A stranger would then draw a sheet over her face and shuffle off to the break room for a snack, leaving the freshly dead Molly Erin Winger, born in Columbus, Ohio, unto Norman and Katherine Winger, alone among machines and boxes of rubber gloves that were no more alive or less dead than she. Then, a day or two later, some of the people with whom she’d shared the earth would put her in the ground. They’d watch her casket being lowered into the open soil and leave her there, all by herself, on a quiet hill among gravestones. Then those people would drive to someone’s house to nibble at turkey wraps and Caesar salad, lament the loss of a life, and ask if there was any barbecue sauce.