I accidentally jaywalked today
I didn’t mean to
I was thinking about tithing
Okay, I wasn’t thinking about tithing
There was a girl
A nice-looking girl
Down the way
She crossed the street
I crossed too
I’m glad the car stopped
And the other car
And the FedEx truck
I wish the bike had stopped
I got up
I shrugged off the paramedics
The girl walked into an emergency preparedness store
I followed her in
She bought two hundred pounds of wheat
I bought four hundred
Also, they don’t deliver
And my car died yesterday
(Finished burying it this morning)
So now I’m on the sidewalk making bread
And the girl is next to me rolling pretzels
(She doesn’t have a car either)
And we’re talking and laughing
A police officer comes up to us
He’s in my ward
He doesn’t want any bread
(Bread dough, anyway)
He saw me earlier
He’s taking me to the station
The girl is smiling at me
(Because it’s me getting carted away, not her)
I look down at the sidewalk
At a long number she made out of pretzel ropes
Odd
(Though the number itself is even)
She pretends her hand is a phone
And smiles again.
Ben is a nerd who reads mostly science fiction and fantasy. Stemming from a severe case of necroglossophilia, he's notorious for [redacted] and [very redacted]. Less controversially, he founded the magazine Mormon Artist and the Mormon Texts Project. By day he masquerades as the senior web designer at the BYU library, surrounded by a heckalot of tasty books. He holds on to the hope that with all of that family history work in the Millennium there'll be at least a little time left over for reading. He has only one wife (and two lovely daughters) (and a shotgun). The end.
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