An excessively muscular man was irately pinning Dale’s neck down against the frigid cement of an obscure back-alley.
Don’t question yourself as to how he got there; for I will not tell you, but let your mind wander free as it must. To you, Dale might be coming out of a poorly orchestrated bank-job, part of a circus act gone horribly wrong, or being attacked by a vicious alien life force. I won’t trouble myself with the tedious task of correcting your erroneous presumptions and will instead spend my ink on impressing the fear that consumed his mind at that moment.
It was complete, unquestionable terror, for this young man was convinced that he was going to die. The shadow of an un-negotiating abyss was clouding the last shred of the hope he might have had for survival and his strength was rapidly leaving him, along with his ability to get air through to his windpipe.
The hopelessness of his situation was not what was going through his mind and filling him with a sudden desire to live however, and as the storyteller, I certainly hope you are as fond of clichés as I, for your approval is what we writers strive for. Then again, I cannot possibly change the goings-on of this story, nor do I have a say in the views of a society, so the blame for this abundance of sentimentality visited repeatedly in pop-culture can’t be placed on me anyhow.
You see, Dale was thinking of, yes, you guessed it, a girl. And not just any girl, of course! This was a spectacular, breathtaking dancer, whose attributes and wit could alter the way your brain functioned just by conversing with you for what would be an instant in her life and a touchstone in yours. Her disposition was so bright, her presence so uplifting, her beauty so incomparable, that when she was in any room its occupants had to be careful not to look directly at her for too long, lest her perfection tarnish all other potentially beautiful sights in this earthly world. Her body moved like wheat in the wind, the product of tireless training, but her mind was supple in the way of rubber: adaptable, but fundamentally impervious to any pressure inflicted upon it. In fact, her intellect was sharp as a diamond and just as solid, so that when even simply speaking to her, one was imprinted with a touch of her brilliance. All of this, of course, is how Dale saw the girl that was filling his universe at that moment.
But why, you ask, did our hero chose THIS girl, out of the roughly 3.5 billion other girls in the world, to think of while he was trying to extricate himself from what may very well have been his final and stickiest of situations? Why, love, of course! I DID state that I was fond of clichés.
It is rather fitting, I must say, that he thought of her as he died of suffocation, since this dream girl of his had never failed to take his breath away. Unfortunately, as the little crevices of the uneven pavement began to embed themselves into his scalp and neck because of the continuous pressure applied by the gargantuan monster-man, this bittersweet coincidence understandably eluded him. Instead, floating in his head, was her face, and the terrorizing thought of never seeing it with his own eyes again.
Another funny fact: although Dale spent nearly every waking moment in her presence since the tender age of twelve, and although the two of them had lived through life’s trials hand in hand for just as long, they had never once acknowledged any feelings of romance directed at one another. What a travesty-engendering move that had turned out to be, for here Dale was, feeling his life fading away with the numerous brain cells that were dying on him, along with every hope he had of one day declaring his love to her.
“Such a simply boyish situation to be in!” he thought. Why on Earth had he delayed trying to obtain what he desired most, why had he squandered even a second on wishing for what could have been his (or might have been his), if only he has asked?
Now Dale could only wish. The possibility of acting upon his wishes was being taken from him.
The last things he saw clearly were his attacker’s violent eyes, framed by creased and coarse skin, and with immense sadness he drowned in the thought that in his last moment, he saw only hate when his own eyes reflected nothing but love. As his vision blurred, his true desires only became clearer, and the pain of his body demanding air was nothing compared to the agony he felt at the thought of never giving this angel his heart in person, out loud, in a way that could never be doubted, or taken back, or contested.
