Previously on Changin' Wind

There are good days, there are bad days, and then there are Red Alert Days - when life finds new, exciting ways of screwing with you. When a Red Alert Day comes, all you want is to curl up in your bed and shut off from the world, but you can’t, because the world is a loud, lousy companion. Penny had had one of those days, and she deluded herself in thinking it was over.

It was a cold May day, one of those days that theoretically couldn’t exist: May should be full of sun, flowers and springy dresses. It was just six PM, but the sun had already bid goodbye, hidden behind a thick veil of clouds. A shower of rain was not-so-gently falling on Penny, and a cold wind was beating on her. She was hurrying to Angel tube station, with a bag of groceries, a bag with a laptop inside, and a big bag of paperwork she needed to complete that night. Too many bags and, on the top of it, her shoes were killing her. She would usually have changed her heeled shoes with a pair of trainers to get home, but yesterday her trainers had self-destructed after a three-years honorable service. She was stuck with the heels, and the bags, and the rain, and the wind. It was an awful finish to an awful day, or so Penny thought. Then she broke a heel.

She couldn’t tell exactly how it happened: she was walking too quickly, she made a wrong move, it just happened. While falling Penny imagined seeing herself from the outside, just like a movie: the young woman with tired eyes who stumbles and fall in slow motion, her hair high in the rain, her three bags flying in three different directions. Then woman and bags hit the ground together.

The slow motion stopped and reality took charge. Penny was on the ground, hurting, and the bag with the paperwork was broken: that damn wind was stealing the sheets of paper one by one. They were flying all around like petals of a sulky flower.