Banana Nut

Written with my Thursday night group with the prompts:  thankful, baking banana nut muffins, authentic, for that special__, keep busy, he was a rubber duckling, intemperate desires, sitting on a park bench, life is pretty good, poor poor me, you can tell it’s moving, they come and go, I am comparing myself with others, Samantha, ambivalent, she felt the difference from there, one or the other is going to kill me, a blimp pilot landed 

Samantha dreamed she was riding atop a rubber duckling, circling the drain, trapped between intemperate desires and the ambivalence of self pity.  “Poor, poor me,” she kept saying in her dream, as she wondered how to escape the whirlpool.  Then she remembered she could swim.  She was just about to dive into the fray when the tantalizing aroma of banana nut muffins wafted into her consciousness and her eyes flew open.  Oh dear, she’d slept through the alarm again.

“For that special morning,” her mother chirped as Samantha tore into the kitchen.  She handed Samantha a warm muffin and a travel mug of black coffee.  Before Samantha could express how thankful she was, her mother pushed her out the door in the direction of the bus stop.  “Good luck on your presentation,” Mom called after her.

Samantha shoved half the muffin in her mouth without breaking stride.  Oh, God, it tasted so good, and as usual she worried she did not take enough time to find joy in the little things—the taste of a muffin, the warmth of coffee, the complex harmony of the red-winged black birds perched in the sycamore above her.

“Oh, for crying out loud, Samantha,” whined the Archangel Rafael as she passed him sitting on a park bench.  “Even the things you worry about are boring.”  He stood up and matched her pace.  “Stop comparing yourself to others!  Your life is pretty good.  You keep busy.  You keep it real.  What more do you want?”

“I dunno,” she mumbled, her mouth still full of walnuts and bananas.

“You don’t know,” he repeated.  “You honestly don’t, do you?  Well, at least you’re authentic in your lack of decisiveness.”

She gulped her coffee.  “I’m not indecisive.  You’re indecisive!”

She heard him laughing as she approached the bus stop, but he was no longer by her side.  She could see there was an unusually large knot of people at the stop.  As a rule, the regulars tended to fluctuate on the university-bound bus.  It was the nature of the beast; students come and go.  But today she felt a difference, even from across the street.  There was silence, but she could see movement there, as if this handful of people—12, 15, at most—were an ocean wave, rolling and rolling, swelling and receding.  Suddenly she realized there was shouting, screaming even, she saw a flash of metal—a weapon of some kind?  A gun?

“Run, Samantha,” Rafael whispered, and she backed away, turning finally as she heard popping, again and again.  Pop. Pop.

Darkness flooded the street, a large shadow, a cloud?  Samantha looked up.  She was still here, she could still look up.  There was no sky, only the gigantic silver contours of a blimp, descending rapidly down upon her. 

“One or the other is going to kill me,” she told Rafael in a surreal, dispassionate tone.

“Savor that last bit of muffin,” he advised.  “I’ll see you on the other side.”

Photo by Yehor Milord on Unsplash