Falling Man

The second chapter of Monorama is "Falling Man," about a fairly normal individual with a fairly normal set of problems, except that he happens to have miraculously survived a malfunctioning parachute.

It's the only story in the book that does not explicitly feature any supernormal elements.  I originally wrote it for Myspace in the same way I compose any longer work, in short increments, usually about a page at a time.  I ended up forgetting all about it, until pulling together the final manuscript for Monorama (there's a story in "Lost Books of Tomorrow" that was also taken for Myspace, thereby completing that source of material).

There's a lot of unintentionally familiar elements in this story, as there is throughout Monorama, for anyone brave enough to read the whole book.  There's a number of individuals in the narrative, including the disturbed man who intentionally sabotages the hero's parachute, and the story jumps from person to person. Mostly it's concerned with the guy who survives the fall, the "Falling Man," who's less obsessed with the fall than a girl who was his instructor while he was taking lessons for the ill-fated event.  If you're looking for normal in these pages, this is as close as you'll get.

The story was originally titled "Yes I Am Falling," after a Beatles song ("I Just Saw A Face"), but I finally modified it, and think it sounds more dramatically pleasing in its present form, the most surreal element of the whole thing.  It suggests that our man never really stopped falling, so in a metaphorical sense, "Falling Man" definitely belongs with the rest of the stuff in Monorama.

All this is a lesson that Myspace is not completely obsolete in 2012.  Yay!