It was a perfectly calm Tuesday afternoon. The sun was bright, the sky clear, the air warm on my skin. I was walking north on Third Avenue. I was excited. Good days were on the horizon. I felt this, completely, surely. A deep red-colored sedan pulled up next to me, but I didn’t think much of it. I like that color, I thought. I walked, it crawled, I walked, it crawled, I walked, it crawled. I noticed then that there was nobody in front of me on the sidewalk. I took a casual glance over my left shoulder just in time to see a moderately tall woman in a deep red-colored dress swing her purse into the right side of my head. As I fell to and collided hard with the cement, I pondered what could have possibly been in that bag that hurt my head so badly. As I was dragged into the backseat of the deep red-colored sedan, I pulled my hand up the side of my head, and felt a pulsing heat and stickiness that meant I was bleeding. I looked at my hand, now a bloody shade of deep red. I like that color, I thought as I lost consciousness.
I woke up tied to a dining room chair in somebody’s kitchen, possibly in New Jersey. My head pounded. I was pretty sure the bleeding had mostly stopped, but I also just might have lost all feeling in my head, so I wasn’t really sure. I heard the clacking of heels on hardwood coming my way. Just as a timer on top of the oven began to scream, that woman in the red dress, now also wearing a blue-and-white checkered apron, pulled a mitt over each hand, reached deep into the oven, and came back out with a tray of cookies. I thought I smelled chocolate, but they turned out to be oatmeal. As she walked toward me, holding the tray firmly with each hand, I realized that the timer was still ringing, I realized that I had absolutely no idea what was happening or why I might have been in New Jersey, I realized that I was really in a lot of pain, and I realized that I would not be able to complete any of my crucial errands unless this ended soon. She briefly stood still in front of me, right in front of me, and just before turning to walk back out of the room, she dropped the tray on to my lap.
