Today I managed to finish the Sunday crossword, watch this week’s episode of Doctor Who, and write this, based on a number of prompts:
“Donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes,” said Troy, “and vending machines kill more people annually than both combined. Daffodils are worse than killer bees; cantaloupes are more dangerous than atomic bombs. It’s just statistics, plain and simple. The fact is, people are scared of all the wrong things.”
Perry was letting him talk. Troy could go on for hours, maybe days, if you let him, but telling him to be quiet almost always had the opposite effect. Say anything like “shut the hell up already, would ya?” and Troy would treat that like a personal challenge. Really, you couldn’t win, so it was best to not even try. Let him talk and maybe he’d get tired of his own voice too.
Perry had mentioned, in passing, that he didn’t like flying. He used to do it all the time for business, before the accident. Hop on a jet one day in Atlanta, wake up the next morning in Kazakhstan or…well, okay, fine, actually Wilmington, back home in Delaware. The company never sent Perry overseas, much less to Kazakhstan. Though wouldn’t that have been funny? He was trying not to lie — that was part of what they’d been working on since the accident — but it was really just for effect, just a joke, so really it was okay, right?
The point is, Perry had never liked it, never grown accustomed to the constant travel, the long layovers, the cramped cabins, the other passengers. And he’d never learned to be okay with the feeling that he was putting his life in some over-tired flight crew’s collective hands every time he flew. Every time he saw a flight attendant so much as yawn on the redeye, he’d be awake for hours.
But it wasn’t like he was phobic. He just didn’t like flying.
But there was Troy, ready to jump in with a wealth of whatever he called them, statistics. How much of what he blathered was even true? How much was he making up right there on the spot? And wouldn’t he just shut the hell up already?
Dr. Lemmell was trying to help Perry with these anger issues, what they’d agreed to think of as “anger issues,” and they’d also agreed it was better just letting Troy talk. It wasn’t fair that he was dominating group, and that he did this every time, whether it was Perry’s turn to talk or one of the others. Just last week, Sheldon, that big dumb lump of a guy everybody said was here because he’d murdered somebody, maybe his wife — only that was dumb, because this wasn’t a jail, and even Perry’s accident hadn’t hurt anybody else, too much — Sheldon was talking for maybe the first time in days, sharing something more than a casual grunt or two in session, and Troy had started rattling on about the weather in Venezuela or how you tell if a poison dart frog was really dangerous, or some other kind of nonsense like that. Perry was learning not to bother listening.
He was never going to get out of the ward if he kept focusing his anger on Troy. He’d be stuck here another six months. And then, after that, he’d be right back where they wanted him, in the Galaxy of the Venom Androids, most dangerous place there was. Even worse than the redeye back to Wilmington, statistics be damned. And Perry was not going to let that happen.
You can probably tell what some of the writing prompts were just by reading it. Anyway, that’s pretty okay for a lazy Sunday, right?