Do It! (Writing Blind Exercise)

Bridget said, "Do it."

Do what?

She often confused me that way. Giving orders, making assertions, delivering pronouncements with no clear beginning. Or end for that matter. They arrived like frogs from the sky, raining down, mostly by ones or twos, but sometimes -- on a good or bad day (I'm still unsure how to classify those days) -- in a veritable downpour of frogs, fish, cats, and dogs. Flooding the storm drains in rivulets of tabby and webbed feet and golden retriever. Forming puddles that would have defied even Michael from Mountains to stir with a stick that he found.

My mother claims Bridget is "barking mad and will inevitably croak," but my mother sometimes confuses literacy with humor. For that matter, she sometimes confuses me with Bridget.

And I'm not so sure Bridget is mad. I think the world she perceives is not at all the world I or most people perceive. And at first I thought this difference in perception was clear evidence of madness. Her world seemed so different from everyone else's, after all. But I've gotten to know her a better and to appreciate her world view. She may be crazy, but I've seen the way stars really can seem to drip when watched long and thoughtfully on a late fall night. I've witnessed the glittering mud, laced with fragments of mica that fracture the sunlight making the mud glow. I no longer think she's crazy. She simply sees things most of us miss. And she's almost frighteningly sane in her light touch just when I need the reassurance, or whispered promise when I need encouragement. And, does it really matter if she's sane or not if she and I find so much good in each other?

So, although I paused for a moment when she said, "Do it," I did the first thing that occurred to me. And just before the bus struck us I remembered the joke about the last thing that passes through a bug's mind when it hits a windshield -- although, actually, I think in the tumble of that last-minute leap it was Bridget's ass that passed through my mind.

Bridget may have been a mannequin, but she was my mannequin.

(This is my response to Alberto's challenge. The odd thing was I knew, generally,  how it would end when I first saw the photo, but I didn't know how it would get there. My thanks to Sandy [http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976856520] for encouraging me to write this and to Donna for providing a template for such a story.)