The Thrill of Falling: Stories

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Maggie Dawn was awake before the alarm went off on her cellphone. She lay quietly in bed for a little while, looking at the patterns on the ceiling caused by the curtains drifting in the morning sun. Then she leant over and reached under the bed for her diary and pen.

Brushing her hair back from her eyes, she wrote: LISTEN UP, WORLD, TODAY IS GOING TO BE A GOOD DAY

‘You got that?’ Maggie Dawn called out the window.

With that out of the way, she got up and smoothed the duvet. She slipped into the dressing gown with the dragon on the back and went down the hallway to the bathroom. Although she was only fifteen, Maggie Dawn was a big girl. Skinny people walked, but calorifically challenged individuals sashayed, a kind of sideways-frontways ambulation of her most prominent feature, as Maggie Dawn liked to call her butt, switching the weight from one cheek to the other.

The word ‘sashayed’ appealed to Maggie Dawn: it brought to mind sway, sidle and sass, which were good adjectives to describe the way she moved through the world.

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