With the front door open and the wind whooping all around the house, Dolly was just getting ready to set foot outside when something very large and flat and metalic - sheet metal? - whizzed by directly in front of her. If she'd stepped out a bare second before, she thought, what would have happened? Would the sheet metal have decapitated her in one swoop? No more Dolly? End of quest?
"This is impossible," she whispered. She turned around to tell Gloria that there was no way she could survive out there with the wind blasting, but the polite little princess was gone now. Gone like the morning mist at noon.
"Gloria?" she called out over her shoulder. The girl, she figured, would step out of a hidden corner, offering words of encouragement to help Dolly along. She did say that she was going to help, didn't she? "Gloria?"
There was no answer.
Dolly took in a deep breath. Okay - so the sheet metal had been there. It scared Dolly to think of the other things that might be hurdling around out there, things that she hadn't seen yet. A while back, in school, she remembered seeing a photo of a wooden stake that had been driving clean through a tree, impaling it. The wind blasts in a storm, the caption said, can get so high that it can send a drinking straw through an apple, or a stake through a tree.
What if the wind had ripped up someone's picket fence and now there were stakes by the hundreds out there, all painted white and perfect, darting through the air in every direction like wooden bullets?
Fear. Again, there's fear. Oh, Dolly was so afraid! But even before Gloria told her that she'd have to leave, she knew that she had to go.
You know, a dark part of her thought...if you're walking along and a sheet of metal comes flying along taking your head off, your body will still keep going for a few more steps?
Stop it.
It might even take off into a run, the voice inside of her said. It's documented, Dolly, that the spinal chord with its thick rope of nerves can and will act as the brain when you're decapitated. If you sit on a lit cigarette by mistake, for example, your spinal chord will act on behalf of the brain and tell your body to get up quickly. Your brain doesn't need to interfere, and your body does what it's told. So without your brain attached to your body, you might take off into a good sprint before your body realizes that it's supposed to be dead. And
"Stop it!" she screamed.
The sheet metal, for some reason she'd paused before stepping out. She was safe. She wasn't decapitated. There was another force working here, one that she had to learn to trust with her safety completely. God was good, she believed in Him. He took care of her. He is what made her pause before stepping out, He was the reason why she missed the sheet of metal.
Dolly took a step out into the howling wind, bringing her arm up to shield herself from the sudden blast.
(your turn
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