Notecard Collection: Two

“The drive home got me thinking about you again. It was the sight of a dead armadillo on the side of the road that did it. Have you ever seen a dead armadillo? I haven’t. Until now I didn’t know they existed. But they do, I’ve seen it. It’s nothing like a live armadillo with its rigid conk-shell roof set evenly against the pull of gravity. The dead one carries this constant slight tilt, like a car with two flat tires on one side. We drove by fast, so I thought it wasn’t dead at all but just moving slowly in the opposite direction, like armadillos do. But it didn’t look up and Dad says it was dead. Didn’t I see the blood? That tilt has stayed with me in my mind, so now I think that gravity isn’t always equally distributed among the dead, that maybe it’s not given evenly to the living either, and it worries me that I’ve never considered this before. I thought you could answer this question because I’ve seen you favor your right leg sometimes for a few seconds after you stand up.”