Last night during the French movie sitting next to S, who looked like a Spice Girl in gold satin pants and pink leotard, I started fantasizing that I had been raped and badly injured, maybe knifed, maybe beaten—but that was not the point. The mechanism of injury was not the fantasy.

Andrew is hauling something out of his room again.

The fantasy was post injury. I was in the hospital and people were visiting me: B and G and S, who in the theater was eating popcorn and taking cow-eyed, concerned looks at me for no reason. In the fantasy, my friends hovered over me and whispered to each other: Our Nona...how will she go on...we love her so. People coalesced in worry about me. (Maybe T will show up, long lost T—surely S will call T—is that what I want?)

The point was I lay in my hospital bed looking out from unspeakable, unquestionable grief.

Then I wrote about it, and this was in the fantasy too, I wrote: This is the story I have to tell. I wish it weren’t my story. I don’t know how to tell this story. But this is the story inside me. And now it will be inside you.

Andrew has closed his door.

S leaned into me and asked did I want some more popcorn and I must have looked forlorn because she put her hand on the back of my head and I could feel all her silver rings. The French man fell in love with his own fiction like only the French (and this narrator) can.

Maybe I could just get hit by a car.

A longing to give upheaval, rising tension—a thermonuclear reaction.

A longing for an earned state of grace. To be a protozoa.

Or jellyfish.

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Nona Caspers’ book of stories Heavier Than Air (University of Massachusettes Press) won the AWP Grace Paley Short Fiction Prize. A Book of One Hundred Days will be available from Spuyten Duyvil in Fall 2007. Her work has been honored with a Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Grant and Award and a Barbara Deming Grant and Award and has appeared in Ontario Review, Cimarron Review, Iowa Review, Fourteen Hills, and New Standards: The First Decade of Fiction at Fourteen Hills, among others.

The above is an excerpt of A Book of One Hundred Days.

Other works on Sidebrow: Day Three, Day Nine, Day Ten, Day Eighteen, Day Twenty-two & Day Twenty-three