"This is Clara. Do not get too acquainted, if you please, because I am about to kill her. There she goes. You may wonder how that happened- cancer, murder, sword play? No, Clara stepped off the outside edge of the Oakwood Bridge, in just the placid, casual manner in which she has done everything since the moment of her birth, twenty-seven years ago. You do not need to know anything specific about this bridge other than the fact that it is a bridge, and that as such it poses the question that all bridges do, especially the very high ones: What if I jumped? Clara, no different than anyone else in most respects, crosses this bridge twice daily every working day on her way to a bus stop. It is because of this statistically high contact with bridges that Clara feels this question more frequently than the rest of us non-bridge crossers would. After contemplating this question, month after month, it comes as no surprise that she would eventually transcend the “What if?” I am sure you are aware that every once in a while someone in this world jumps off a bridge, and while a large fraction of these are suicides, the fraction of those that do it merely to sate human impulse must not be ignored. Victimized by an apprehensive fate who, nearing the end of a business quarter, had not met its quota of bridge jumpers, Clara has stepped off herself. If not her, it would have probably been someone else. Humans are attracted to voids.
It is not perhaps fair to lay all the blame for Clara’s demise on the unavoidable gravity of statistics. After all, as has been said, I killed Clara. I made her human anyway, and it is perhaps my little voice that whispered “What if?” into her ear those many, many times. Be comforted, however, by the knowledge that Clara’s death was not terrifying and involved very little regret. She did not fall, flailing with useless wings and screaming, into the river’s hard-hearted bottom. Her first step set her wafting downward, feet swaying upward first, body comfortably arched and making slow parabolic patterns, as if being swung in a hammock of air making its descent down the ravine. A half smile on her face, her right hand touched the water first, and she seemed to dissolve into a thousand pieces, each choosing its own solitary way from then on. An epiphany before dissolution amused her greatly: the god who had made her, taken her, and to whom she had prayed for all these years was, in fact, me."
It is not perhaps fair to lay all the blame for Clara’s demise on the unavoidable gravity of statistics. After all, as has been said, I killed Clara. I made her human anyway, and it is perhaps my little voice that whispered “What if?” into her ear those many, many times. Be comforted, however, by the knowledge that Clara’s death was not terrifying and involved very little regret. She did not fall, flailing with useless wings and screaming, into the river’s hard-hearted bottom. Her first step set her wafting downward, feet swaying upward first, body comfortably arched and making slow parabolic patterns, as if being swung in a hammock of air making its descent down the ravine. A half smile on her face, her right hand touched the water first, and she seemed to dissolve into a thousand pieces, each choosing its own solitary way from then on. An epiphany before dissolution amused her greatly: the god who had made her, taken her, and to whom she had prayed for all these years was, in fact, me."
