L i n d a  A.  L a v i d                                                                                          

 On Creative Writing(PDF or TXT)

For a brief moment during his lunch hour, Myron felt relieved from the threat of terrorism.  It occurred while eating a cheese and pepperoni hot pocket. Condoleezza Rice was on television.  Her name was spelled beneath her talking head.  He thought it was overextended, not the talking head, but the name, and definitively convoluted.  Condoleezza herself was another anomaly, not only a woman and black and Republican but curiously cute and somewhat childlike only with a razor-sharp brain and powerful voice.  The woman, he decided between sips of Dr. Pepper, was capable, but could she be trusted?  He then wondered where she’d been on September 11th.  Most likely in the same bunker with the old boy network.  In a flash, he discounted her and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin.  And by the time the noon news moved onto the weather, Myron returned to thinking about terrorism and how he could possibly survive it.

A week previous to watching Dr.  Rice, Myron had spent seventy-two hours in observation at a psychiatric emergency room.  He had been admitted after he was found ministering to those who’d listen at Wal-Mart the prophetic words of Jim Morrison, “No one gets out alive.” He truly meant it as consolation (everyone has to die sometime), but no one wanted to take any chances.  The bulge in his back pocket could have been plastic explosives, not the flashlight he had absentmindedly placed there after his hands were full with a hefty box of cornflakes, batteries, toaster, and he didn’t want to make a  trip to the front of the store for a cart.