FELLED

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

A message from Rantown reports that Olivia Milam, the well-known singer, was injured in an automobile accident early Wednesday morning. The accident concerned only one vehicle, Milam’s red convertible. At the corner of Defense and Rawls Streets, the brakes of the car seized suddenly and Milam was propelled out over the windshield. She landed against a fumigation tent that surrounded a house on Rawls Street, and miraculously suffered only minor bruises. As she stood, she set her foot down upon a Superslick Banana Peel, a novelty item manufactured by the Laffs and Larks Company of Blakely, and fell hard into a low retaining wall, bruising her head and neck. Despite her injuries, Milam was able to make the night train from Rantown to Leat. Word had by then circulated of her mishap, and she stood on the platform and addressed the assembled reporters. “Recovery is not something that happens,” she siad. “It is something that is made to happen.” She demonstrated by smiling broadly, and then by lighting up a cigarette in imitation of her famous pose from the cover of her classic second album, Pattern Lightning. Though she had been only an occasional smoker most of her life, something about the cigarette on the platform pleased her more than she expected it might. She purchased a pack in the club car and smoked most of the way from Rantown to Leat. Toward the end of the journey, she abruptly lost her taste for it and, putting finger behind thumb, flicked the lit cigarette, her last if not the last of the pack, out into the night. It ignited a patch of furze that bordered upon a powder magazine in Shakelike Camp, near Stafford Heights, spread rapidly, and caught a stack of cases containing munitions, which exploded. Two in the vicinity were killed, a young soldier named Elsa Turpin and a civilian named Hanson Shanks. Shanks was the son of C. Beckett Shanks, the owner of the national chain of novelty shops that had sold the Superslick Banana Peel that had felled Milam. He did not remark upon the irony at his son’s funeral, as he did not know of it. Milam, who knew of it, did not remark upon it either.