The Impact

She stood there knowing there was no point, not any more. She knew that, she felt that. There could be no doubt at all. She had to go, get away. Get away from it all.

She looked down. It was a long way down, It looked like - well, it looked like looking down from the top of a very high building. The people, the cars, the vans, the lorries and the buses - they didn't look like ants at all. They looked like a scene in a film, or TV programme showing the view from a high building, looking straight down.

It is true, she thought. Film and television do destroy our ability to imagine, for every event in our lives, every moment; we can remember scenes seen before, on the screen. We know what to do, what to say, what to think. We know how to act. That very scene rehearsed for all of us so many times before.

She glanced down again. She saw a white van parking in the place she would probably land. She recalled the scene from a recent TV detective series, a sprawled spread body with its shape outlined in relief on the whit roof of the van and the blood pooling around it. She shivered, imagining the impact.

Carefully, she turned back, moving slowly away from the roof edge. After a few deep breaths, she began to walk back across the roof to the safety of the staircase.

She laughed in relief as the tension ebbed away, imagining the headline:

Television Saved Her Life!