Ten Plus One

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Nobody thinks about death on a nice spring day.

Autumn is the time for dying, not spring. Autumn encourages macabre thoughts, invites the ghoulish imagination, tempts the death wish with sere and withered evidence of decay. Autumn is poetic as hell, brief, succinct, stinking of mold and ashes. People die a lot in autumn. Everything dies a lot in autumn.

Nothing is allowed to die in the spring. There’s a law that says so—Penal Law 5,006, DEATH IN THE SPRING: “Whosoever shall expire, or cause to expire, or conspire to expire, or harbor thoughts of expiring during the vernal equinox shall be guilty of a felony punishable by…” It goes on like that. It absolutely forbids death between March 21 and June 21, but there are lawbreakers everywhere, so what can you do?

The man who stepped out of the office building on Culver Avenue was about to become a lawbreaker. Normally, he was a good citizen, a hard-working man, a faithful husband, a devoted father, all that jazz. He had no intention of breaking the law. He didn’t know that death was forbidden by legislature, but even if he had known, it wouldn’t have concerned him, because death and dying were the furthest things from his mind on that bright spring day.

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