15 Minutes To Live

I'm participating in #Trust30.    #Trust30 is an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself. Use this as an opportunity to reflect on your now, and to create direction for your future. 30 prompts from inspiring thought-leaders will guide you on your writing journey.    

Today's prompt by Gwen Bell:

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.

1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.
2. Write the story that has to be written.

-----------My Story----------

I should be in New Orleans.   When the judge told me I was to be executed in fifteen minutes,  I found myself thinking about my home town.   Thinking about the taste of a shrimp po boy, dressed with lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise;  of sticky, muggy, HOT nights, riding the Zephyr at Pontchartrain Beach.   Remembering Mardi Gras parades,  Hurricanes at Pat O'Briens and the ever-changing spectacle of people-watching on Bourbon Street.   I found myself thinking that if I had never left New Orleans,  I never would have ended up  being executed for breathing without a license on a space habitat no one back home ever heard of.     I tried to remember the taste of oysters Bienville,  to hear the sound of the streetcars sling-slanging down St. Charles Avenue, to recall the wonderful iciness of a chocolate snowball on hot summer day.   

As the air-tight door closed behind me I pictured myself as a child,  on a day trip on the paddle-wheel riverboat Mark Twain,  recalled my senior prom at the Roosevelt Hotel and pictured the double shotgun house where I grew up on Iberville Street.  As I tried to remember the names of the brother and sister who had lived down on the corner,   were they Dawn and Ken,  or were they Frank and Ruth, or...the air tight door ahead of me opened,  and I was spaced.