Writing Prompt: A Sequence of Events

Writing Prompt #419

He was walking down the street minding his own business. He didn’t know that several events were, at that very moment, plotting against him, planning an assault on his otherwise peaceful day.

Although they seemed to leap out at him all at once, they did not attack at exactly the same moment. There was an sequence, one happening after the other, but so quickly that for a long time he couldn’t pin down what had happened first. In fact, it was the SUV.

A large European luxury SUV came roaring up the narrow, quiet street in a hurry. This caused him to leap over to the side of the road to preserve his life.

Next was the screeching, giggling pack of schoolchildren that witnessed his escape from death. He’d never liked schoolchildren, even when he was one. He always felt that they were making fun of him. This pack was, and that knowledge annoyed him even more than his next discovery.

He had kept his life, but at the expense of a shoe: he’d put his foot in the gutter in his adventure with the SUV.

It was the final event that caused him to recall this sequence of happenings with fond remembrance instead of avoiding thinking of it at all, and it was: “Sir, are you all right?”

She was the most beautiful creature he’d ever laid eyes on. He looked from her face to her hand, which she was holding out to aid him. His eyes next found the newspaper he had crumpled to unreadability in the previous moments. He dropped it absently and reached out for her.

As they walked together away from the eventful scene, he reflected that the SUV that had almost run him off the road was the nicest model out, and the shoe he had lost, though expensive, had been very uncomfortable, and that the important thoughts he had been thinking before his adventure(s) were not so important after all.

His reflections on the schoolchildren, however, who gigglingly followed them down the street for rather longer than he would have liked, did not alter for many years. It took their having several of their own to change his mind.