Coincidence

Lately I’ve found myself tempted to take part in other peoples’ coincidences, and it’s all I can do to restrain myself. I’d just gotten home yesterday evening, and had left the front door open on account of the air being so cool. I’d received a package in the mail, and was using a steak knife to slice through the four hundred yards of super-reinforced tape they wrapped around it when I overheard a conversation outside. I went to the living room, knife still in hand, to get a better view. Two women strolled abreast down the sidewalk, one of them speaking with great enthusiasm about how events in her life had recently come to a head. “Then,” she said, “with him holding me at knifepoint, I’m like, I just can’t take this anymore…”

I looked down at the knife in my hand and felt guilty for no apparent reason. Or perhaps there was a reason. For just a second, I thought wouldn’t be fun to run out my door and leap from the bushes brandishing the knife over my head? Oh, the stories the woman could tell her friends then! A coincidence like no other, that’s what it would be. At least, that’s how it would seem to her.

But then I went back to the kitchen to finish unpackaging my new book on relationships.

Related Tales

» “What the Other Hand Is Doing” (26 of Apr, 2003)
» “Terminal II” (03 of Apr, 2003)
» “Terminal” (31 of Mar, 2003)