Proverbs 16:18-19

Original post date: Friday, October 31, 2008


Proverbs 16:18-19

Proverbs 16:18-19 Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

It was an inch hole that was calling to be threaded. Silver marine steel, bent while it was the color of the sun, and threaded to a point. He took his drill and climbed up the ladder. The ceiling was fifteen feet, plenty high enough. The thick soles of his shoes scuffed the aluminum rungs of the ladder as his left hand ran up the orange fiberglass frame. He was ten feet up in the air and standing on a yellow piece of plastic that was eighteen inches long and eight inches wide. The text under his feet was inked red and said "DO NOT STAND." All he could see was DO … AND. "Do and, what?" he thought.

He reached above his head and placed the drill bit on the pencil mark. "'X' marks the spot, I wonder what kind of treasure I am going to find," he said out loud. He started to drill and felt the bit bite into the wood truss in the attic. Squinting from the drywall dust that always seems to fall right into his eyes he thought, "I should have put on those dorky safety glasses, but it doesn't really matter anyway." He climbed back down the ladder, put the bit back in the black box with bright yellow letters on it, and placed the drill in a larger version of that black box from the same company.

He slid the eyebolt into his back pocket and from his tool bag grabbed a long flat bladed screw driver with a blue and red handle and put that in his other pocket. He climbed back up the ladder with both hands running up the fiberglass rails. Balancing on the yellow plastic plank he pulled out the eyebolt and screwdriver and started to screw in the eyebolt into the pilot hole. Once he couldn't tighten it any more with his hand he slid the business end of the screwdriver into the hole and used it as a lever to rotate the curve of steel to its hilt.

He wanted to slide down the rails of the ladder like he saw so many times in the movies but didn't. "You'd just fall and kill yourself you dumbass," he said aloud to nobody but himself. Instead he just stepped down the rungs and put his screwdriver back into the loop inside his tool bag. When he was at the hardware store looking he purposefully picked up the thick, brown, prickly rope. This was not supposed to be a comfortable endeavor.

He took a bite of the rope and folded it onto itself and with seven loops he tucked the end into the top bite and pulled to make it snug. He always read that this was the best knot, basically a beefy slipknot. He had ten feet of rope trailing out of his seven loops and traced the rope to the other end. Holding onto the tail end of the rope he used his wingspan to find approximately six feet and tied a figure eight.

Another trek up the ladder he took, this time there was a brown snake following him up, whipping and twirling as he pulled it further from the ground. He almost licked the end of the rope as if he were threading a needle and let out a giggle while he placed the end through the eyebolt. He traced the eight with the end of the rope and tied it off. Grabbing the knot he pulled himself off of the ladder and looked down and spread his legs and read, "DO NOT STAND." He giggled again.

He almost fell as he quickly climbed down the ladder and had to jump off of the third rung. He bent over and grabbed his tool bag and drill and carried them to his closet. When he came back he stood and looked up at the ladder, and the brown bristly snake dangling from a needle. He pushed up the cross bars on the ladder and folded it up. Leaning it over he carried it out through the doors and laid it down in the garage. He saw an old canvas bag that he got from a bank. The bank logo was a green square with round corners and the text was a large serif font. He picked it up and carried it with him inside.

He climbed the stairs in the foyer and stood on the landing at the top for an hour looking out at two knots, one that is used to save lives and one that is used to end them and found the irony of it frightening. He felt the sweat slide down the side of his torso and that broke his paralysis. He stepped up to the rail and threw his leg over and pulled himself onto the other side.

His left hand gripped the rail through the bank bag and his right reached out and took a hold of the rope. He needed another hand. Letting go of the rope he placed the bag over his head and could see pinpricks of light shining through like the lights from a city viewed from a window seat on a plane at night. He took a deep breath and the bag pressed against his lips and was drawn up to his nose. Once again he held onto the rail with his left hand and reached for the rope with his right, mimicking a blind man reaching for an object he knows is there but was moved just slightly.

Balancing on the heels of his feet he places the rope around his neck and sets the knot on the left side, doing this only because he has read somewhere that it helps the process. Giving the rope a pull he can feel the knot press against his left ear and even through the canvas he can feel the spines of the rope digging into his skin.

He feels his hands shaking as he lets go of the rail and steps out, leading with his right foot. He falls four feet, and his head stops just below the chandelier made of wrought iron. He hears the pop of his C2 and C3 vertebrae but doesn't feel it. He doesn't feel the blood that trickles from his left ear where the knot came to rest. And he can't see how the bank logo turned brown from the spray of blood that left his nose as his body came to a halt with his toes thirteen inches from the Mexican tile floor.









disclaimer: Do not freak out this is not me...I had this crazy image in my head and I had to write it down.

Garrett I hope you don't mind I used your parents old house in Queens Harbor, don't know why I envisioned this there but I did.