Not The Best Tuesday

    I watched as Delvin threaded the needle, noticed the point. It looked sharp. This is going to hurt, I thought. Maybe I don’t really need those wings, I thought. Maybe I could just fly on airplanes like most people do. Delvin thought otherwise.
    “It’ll be great,” he said. “Flying. Nothing impresses the ladies like a man who can fly.”
    If I told you I wasn’t having synthetic wings sewn onto my back to be a more attractive mate to the opposite sex, I’d be lying. And Delvin knew that. Delvin had had no such problem. He did have a unicorn-like horn protruding from his forehead, which I assumed had a great deal to do with the women always flocking around his cage. Still, he believed that wings were the answer for me, and he was more than willing to help in the creation, and now, attachment of the planks of wood, on which we glued all those feathers, on which we'd attached silk, for luxury and comfort.
    Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. And so forth until, my back covered in blood, Delvin stood. “We’re all done.”
    “How do they look?”
    “They look great. Let’s test them out.”
    We walked up the stairs to the roof of the old glove factory. “This is gonna be awesome,” Delvin said.
    I stepped to the edge and looked down. Then I leaped, the possibilities of my new life with wings dancing through my mind. I’d rob banks with impunity. I’d be the best wide receiver the NFL has ever seen, despite my whiteness. I’d be surrounded by women, all of them gifted in the jugs and butt and face areas. “Yabba dabba doo,” I said in my best Fred Flintstone voice.
    Then I heard Delvin laugh in a sinister tone. At first I thought he was laughing at my Fred Flintstone--but, no, not that laugh. That laugh would have gone “Hee hee.” This laugh went, “Muhahaha.”
    Then I remembered how mean I was to Delvin all the time. And, just as the pavement approached my face, I felt an unfamiliar feeling, which I’d later find out was something called regret; for mistaking his visiting mother for an intruder and cursing at her, and punching her with a roll of quarters. For calling him “Hornface” all the time when he regularly, tearfully begged for me to call him by his given name. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t know his name. Delvin is just something I made up, for the sake of my story.
    I regretted impregnating his sister, then selling the baby to some guy I met at a Blink 182 concert. Most of all, I regretted that he had tricked me, that I was rapidly plummeting to my death. “Stop, drop, and roll,” I thought. In case of falling (or willfully jumping) off a building, you’re supposed to stop drop and roll. I think I read that somewhere. But then the pavement hit.
    I woke up to a river filled with damned souls. A three-headed dog was growling at me. A guy named Charon told me the dog's name was Cerberus. I petted Cerberus, and he bit me with each of his three mouths. Then Charon asked for some coins. The coins!
    No, I didn’t have any coins. So now, I’m just hanging out by this river of wailing corpses.
    Not the best Tuesday.