Worst Injury

[Kersus]

What is the worst injury you've sustained?

[Oedipussy Rex]

Back in my early teens, let's say 14, my parents bought a big 18 or 20 cu. ft. coffin freezer. That thing sat in the dining room, next to the basement door for a couple months when my mother, tired of telling my father to put the goddamn thing in the basement, decided that if he wasn't going to do it, the rest of us were.

Let me try to give you the picture. Our house was built in the early 1900s, possibly the late 1800s. It was two story with a full basement. The up stairs were on the west side of the house with a couple of windows. The basement stairs were under these stairs. This is important to the story: one side of the basement stairs had the outside wall and foundation, the other was wall/floor/open space, and above was the staircase: inverted rise over run. All of this unfinished because it's a basement, not living quarters. So you have skinny, 120 lb, 14-year-old me on the stairs trying to guide a, -- I don't know, 150? 200 lb.? Remember, this was the days before Energy Star -- big-ass block down a very steep slope while my mother and two younger sisters are above trying to ease it down when they lose their grip. I get shoved backwards in the chest while my head is stopped by the upstairs. That's when I was decapitated and the past 35+ years are the dying dream of an oxygen-deprived brain living its last seconds.

It's also how I know with certainty that there is no such thing as a god. Because if there were a god and the freezer's lid's hinge really did catch on the top of the foundation, stopping the freezer with just enough room for me to turn my head and barely squeeze out, then why is my life such a banal and miserable existence of unrealized potential?

You know what the worst part is? Knowing that I have such a lack of imagination that this banal, miserable existence is what my dying brain came up with.