Jacqueline Doyle: FACEPLANT • Cleaver Magazine

Flash Nonfiction by Jacqueline Doyle
FACEPLANT

There was no time to think, just seconds as you fell, before your face hit the concrete with a sickening thud and so much force that you were sure you were dead or just about to die. It was stupid, running in your slippers from your son’s room behind the detached garage to the back door, clutching a piece of paper where you’d added his takeout order to yours for dinner. Why did you hurry when there was no hurry? Why were you running in your slippers? Why did you trip on the uneven concrete this time and never before? Time stopped.

Stops. You know you’re not dead, because you yell “Help!” and your son comes running but you still can’t move, you can’t move at all. Are you paralyzed? He calls out “Dad!” and then your husband is hovering over you, too, and you can tell this is really bad from the shocked looks on their faces. Your son puts a pillow under your head. You roll to the side but your arms, bent at the elbows, flop uselessly. Will you be paralyzed from the neck down? You remember now what kids call it: a faceplant. Don’t skateboarders faceplant all the time? And they’re okay. They even joke about it later. But older women often die after falls less serious than this one. “Any falls?” your endocrinologist asks each time you see her for your osteoporosis shot. “Of course not,” you say to her, because you’re not one of those elderly women who falls, and late sixties isn’t really elderly these days, is it? Your bones seem fine to you, you’ve never fallen. Now it’s happened.

Later, after the ER, after the black eyes fade, after the blurred vision from your mild concussion disappears, after a root canal for your damaged front tooth, you’ll know you’re okay. “Don’t run,” your general practitioner tells you, and that seems to be the end of it.

But the memory remains. The last seconds before the fall replay over and over, for months. You’ll be standing in the fast check-out line at the supermarket without a cart, juggling last-minute purchases for dinner, or washing the dishes, hands soapy under the warm water, idly reviewing the day, and suddenly you’re there again: the cement rushing to meet your face, your face rushing to meet the cement, the stunned intake of breath before the darkness, the shocked sense that it was happening, there is nothing you can do, it is happening. You can’t seem to escape the finality of that thud, how unexpected it was. You weren’t ready. You arrived at the ER in your slippers, clutching a takeout order for chicken enchiladas you wouldn’t eat, a scrap of paper crumpled in your fist. You’re still not ready. There will be nothing you can do.

Jacqueline Doyle lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. A previous contributor to Cleaver, she has recent flash in Ghost Parachute, Aquifer, Fictive Dream, Centaur, Midway Journal, and Bending Genres. Her flash fiction chapbook The Missing Girl is available from Black Lawrence Press, and her hybrid essay collection The Lunatics’ Ball is forthcoming. Find her online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com and on Bluesky @jacqdoyle.bsky.social.