Never have I ever…

I thought I’d post some of what I’ve been doing in my fiction course.  This was written for a classmate’s assignment.  She had us write down “Never have I ever _____” on a piece of paper.  Then we passed the paper to our right and got someone else’s paper.  Their “never have I ever” became the prompt for our assignment.  The one I got was “Never have I ever done a cartwheel.”  And this is part of what I wrote.  It’s fictional (obviously, since it’s for my fiction course): 

Never have I ever done a cartwheel.  Every now and then, when I was younger, I would throw myself into an awkward, exuberant loop, with my thin arms and legs stuck out like the bent spindles of a broken bicycle wheel.  But never a full cartwheel.  I could never trust myself enough to reverse gravity and the horizon and everything, even for that split second. 
 
Once, I almost made it.  In the third grade, Emily and Madalyn and I would fearlessly fling ourselves through the monkey bars and jungle gym and race each other down the soccer field, catching grasshoppers in rinsed-out baby food jars that Madalyn’s mother sent with her for the class to do craft projects with. 
 
One day, we were at the end of the field when Madalyn said she had news.  “I get to do the bar in gymnastics now.”
 
“Cool,” said Emily, who sat in the lip of the giant cement culvert that we weren’t supposed to crawl in, but did anyway.
 
“My teacher said I have the pertest cartwheel she’s ever seen,” Madalyn bragged.
 
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
 
“Dunno.”
 
“Oh.”    
 
Madalyn rolled over in the grass and yawned.  “Must be good.  Hardly anybody gets to do a cartwheel on the bar.”  I picked at a Matchbox car that a younger boy had left half-buried in the red clay.  Madalyn lifted her head and looked at us.  “Can you do a cartwheel?” she asked. 
 
“Uh, yeah,” said Emily, rolling her eyes as if that had been a stupid question.  To prove it, she lowered herself from the culvert, pulled her hair into a ponytail, and executed a neat, perfectly circular cartwheel.  “I can do a somersault too.”  She jumped up and flipped, landed a little messily, and as an afterthought, stuck her hands in the air like an Olympic gymnast in a leotard might do.  Madalyn and I clapped, and then Madalyn looked at me. 
 
“Uh…”  I got up.  I had to do a cartwheel.  Right then and there.  No guts, no glory.  I adjusted my headband, and then adjusted my sleeves, and then checked to make sure my shoelaces were tied, until I knew I could keep them in suspense no longer.  I dried my sweating palms on my leggings.  And then I launched myself.  For a moment, I stood on one hand, feeling like Atlas with the world balanced on the heel of my hand, the stalactite buildings lowering their spines around me, the birds flying upside down through the sky.  I’d entered a new dimension, where air was ground and my head felt thick and heavy with the blood rushing to it.  And then the world rolled off of my palm and came crashing down on me.  I lay on the ground facedown for a moment, until I heard Madalyn and Emily asking me if I was alright, and I felt the sharp pain in my right big toe. 
 
My mother was not pleased.  She had to take me to the emergency room and had to pay $300 for the visit.  How could she understand?  She’d never seen that strange world that I’d glimpsed for two seconds. 

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Oh, and an update:  the blogroll is back, but the header is not.  And I can’t upload it, because I no longer have the original file for whatever reason.  So until I’m able to hunt it up, bear with me and the ugly maroon header. 

Another update:  The header is back, at least temporarily.  According to another fabulous WordPress user, the glitch was systemwide.