It was raining.  It was raining and she was without an umbrella.  It was raining and her Plymouth Horizon had sputtered to a stop while she was only halfway through parking it.  It was raining and she was strongly suspecting that this, the endless purgatory of a climate that wishes you to commit suicide, was one of the many pieces of England she’d brought with her.  It was indeed a British rain, meaning that it lacked compensating drama yet somehow slowly soaked down to the soul and once there quenched the will to live.  It blurred every feature visible through the windshield and she figured, with uncharacteristic poetry, that this must be what it was like to live inside a teardrop. 

She remained half-in, half-out of the parking space and diagonally straddling the adjacent stall.  The truncated hatchback-end of the powder blue Horizon stuck out mid-lane but Mandy cared not.  She checked her watch.  Late already.  Leave it as it is she decided and hopefully some enraged bacon-fed plaid shirt in a three-storey pick up might happen by and put this little piece of shit that had the audacity to call itself a vehicle out of its misery.  She reached into the back seat for her vinyl attaché and felt her right breast slip out of her bra.

With a huff and a frown, she rearranged herself, yanked her keys from the ignition, and spent several seconds mentally preparing for the trek across the parking lot.  Then she was up and out and at that moment the drizzling, dispiriting, vertical dampness changed into a deluge of heavy drops interspersed with razor-edged hail.

“Ah Jesus!” screeched Mandy.  But it was of no use: God looked the other way.  A great wind, originally dispatched from the Arctic circle and accelerated across the Prairies, blew Mandy back against her car.  And then the vortex turned the attaché, which Mandy had been using as an ersatz umbrella, into an aerofoil that promptly was ripped from Mandy’s grasp and went sailing away from the plaza and its parking and into the middle of the street.  A van decorated with an air-brushed masterpiece of a werewolf half-transformed beneath a phosphorescent moon promptly ran it over.  Even with her mascara running and stinging her eyes mostly shut, Mandy was able to see that the attaché had burst at its seams.  A gust from a passing vehicle in the lane opposite lifted the upward-facing flank of the attaché skyward and exposed all sorts of vital paperwork to the elements. 

Mandy hung her head and made a fist of her now quite chilled and ice-bit left hand and shook it at nothing in particular.  And then, and only because the hail was now hitting her as if discharged from a divine and celestial shotgun, she turned towards the plaza and skittered off in the direction of her destination.  Running proved impossible because Mandy’s pencil skirt, bought in a moment of two double gin and tonics fuelled spontaneity, proved extremely immobilising when one wanted to move at a pace quicker than an ultra-feminine, mostly paralysed sashay.  She found it quite impossible to separate her knees more than two inches either forwards and backwards or side to side.  Thus, she sort of bounced across the parking lot like a woman competing against only herself in a solo three-legged race.  After what seemed like an undignified eternity of pain physical and psychic, Mandy arrived at the curb outside the temp agency and attempted to mount it.  The toe of her leading foot failed to clear the obstacle and with Mandy falling forward proved a point around which her whole body was compelled to pivot forward.  She dove unwillingly across the short, concreted space between curb and plaza wall.  Happily, her outstretched hands collided against a section of red brick wall and not the entirely-glass temp agency front door.  But, less happily, the collision served to arrest only her forward motion.  Instinctively, she scrabbled for some kind of grip but was unable to stop herself from plummeting to the ground tit-first.  As she landed, any breath of air she ever had breathed or ever would was violently expelled from her by the unyielding laws of physics.

She lay like that for some time.  Her hands remained about a foot up the wall, having being dragged to their current position during her straight-down horizontal fall.  The skin was quite gone from her palms, she was sure.

She was now soaked to her very marrow.  Her mid-eighties shoulders pads were acting as sponges and were so thoroughly engorged that they were actually helping gravity pin her to the ground.  Yet, in a display of strength she had not known she possessed; she was able to at last prop herself up on one arm.  She twisted around.  She grunted and she groaned and she gritted her teeth.  She was at last standing, the temp agency door before her and reflecting demolishment, yes, but also…a miracle.    

For she was done: hail-slashed, drenched, bruised and eye makeup, applied that morning in trendy cack-handed abandon, running now in blue-black rivulets down her cheeks and off her jawline.

But.

Her strawberry blonde hair, cut in a flirty asymmetric bob and sealed both with copious amounts of L’Oréal Studio line mousse and Super-Hold Aqua-Net hairspray had proven impervious to the elements and, like a phoenix risen from the fire, was the only part of Mandy currently undamaged.  As she watched, a piece of masonry the size of a volleyball detached from the faux entablature above, struck the top of her coif and bounced off harmlessly to shatter near her feet.

And that is when Mandy Manwaring-Jones realized she was immortal.