Read Online Spooky Little Girl by Laurie Notaro - Free Book Online Page B

disastrous vanity car ran me over?”
    “Well, not exactly,” Ruby offered. “He was a little too close to you, and as he passed, the side mirror whacked your head from behind and rendered it into a projectile, you could say. It then bounced several times, due to the foam core of the helmet, and then finally rolled behind a bush, resting next to a Big Mac wrapper and a Styrofoam cup.”
    “I was decapitated and then wound up as litter,” the bicyclist concluded. “That is a ridiculous way to die. I somehow thought my ending would be more … significant. Earnest, if you will.”
    “Don’t we all hope that, Mr. Marks?” Ruby said, trying to be comforting. “We all carry the hope that our death will not be in vain, or that it will assume some higher translation, maybe even taking on metaphoric stature. In life, we all want our deaths to be magnificent and relevant. And in your case … I’m sorry, no.”
    “I still don’t understand why I’m here,” the ski bunny said. “I think a mistake has been made. I don’t see how I’m supposedly dead. If I’m dead, how did I die? Avalanche? I fell off the ski lift? Did I hit a tree on my last run?”
    Ruby nodded, then ran her finger down the top sheet of a stack of papers before her. “Mrs. Wootig, Mrs. Wootig … Ahhhh, I see. It seems your assets froze, then exploded. Apparently if you had gone for a respectable C cup or even merely a single letter with your augmentation, you wouldn’t be here right now. It would have just been a case of frostbite. They went like grenades, it says here. Oh, that’s terrible.
Terrible
. And as long as we’re on the subject, Mr. Granger, in the camouflage, if there was any doubt in your mind, your son didbag a 250-pound buck, but it was you. Did you see that coming when you bought him his first BB gun for his eleventh birthday? Really? Not even a bit, not a hint? Curious. All right, then. So … We have fish food, bed wetter, flying head, buck shot, peanut sucker, boobsicles and that brings us to Lucy, who we all know got flattened like a shoe insert by a city bus. According to my list, I think we’re all here.”
    I
have
to remember that, Lucy stressed to herself. She could see Alice shooting coffee out of her nose over boobsicles. She hoped she could remember it all—waking up and thinking she was in a county hospital, trying to find her classroom, looking for a phone, thinking Bethanny was a mental patient, finding out she was a Surprise Demise, who lost a head, who got shot, or eaten by a shark, all of it. This dream had to be lasting for hours, she realized. This was the longest dream she’d ever had. This was incredible entertainment!
    “Can I sleep now that I’m dead?” Lucy offered up sarcastically with a hearty laugh. She figured, hell, if this was her dream, she ought to get a couple of one-liners in. “Has it been half an hour yet? Does the devil know I’m here? Whoa, I feel drunk—that must be some powerful embalming solution! Can I have my next one on the rocks?”
    “This is crazy! I don’t think you’re funny, Lucy!” Bethanny objected. “I am not dead. I’m talking; you can see me. Send me back! I want to go back!”
    “Bethanny, dear,” Ruby said as she slightly raised her right hand, “the only part of you that hasn’t been completely digested yet in the GI tract of a sea monster is your right leg, and it’s stuck on a coral reef at the bottom of the ocean. Angelfish have already nibbled on it. An eel is flirting with it. No one simply wants to be a leg, do they? Do they? Just one nibbled-on leg?”
    Bethanny returned Ruby’s soft look with an embittered pout that rendered her face a light shade of port wine.
    “I can’t believe I’m not an angel!”
she finally erupted as she stompeda flipper to the floor with a loud, rubbery snap. “
Why
am I not an angel? I bet Anna Nicole is an angel! This isn’t fair! I want to be sitting on a cloud, spying on people! I want to wear flowy robes and