Running With It

You can blame/thank Pat for this little bit of flash fiction. It came to me after reading her post on Monday.

~ Rebecca

She was tiny, cute, and nothing but trouble. At least, that's what Myra kept telling herself. She'd read every self-help book she could find on the internet about positive re-enforcement. You are what you believe you are. People will treat you the way you project yourself. Picture yourself as you want others to see you. Fake it until you make it.
Yeah, none of that really worked.
To be honest, Myra wasn't entirely sure she had workable material. She was short. She had been told several times that she was adorable in a gawky nerd girl sort of way. And she was a bit clumsy and did tend to be getting into scrapes all the time, usually in ways that were a bit humiliating. The problem was that she was having a hard spinning that into something vaguely attractive. Maybe she just wasn't faking it hard enough.
Time to try being hot, young and exciting someplace new, where they didn't automatically pull out a first aid kit as soon as she walked in the door. Fake it 'til ya make it, baby. She still had a couple months until her ten year high school reunion to transform herself from an awkward caterpillar to a glorious butterfly!
Myra peered at the hole-in-the-wall honky tonk bar through the fogged over windows of her Camry warily. They were fogged over because she'd been sitting here in the parking lot, talking herself into giving this one more try for the last forty-five minutes. I wasn't going so well. Maybe she should go back to her usual bar. Surely they wouldn't actually pull out the first aide kit again.
It wasn't like it was her fault that someone had needed a butterfly bandage every time she visited. She had only been at the Bozeman Bar and Grill for fifteen minutes when those drunk tourists got into an argument that resulted in a broken beer bottle and a slashed palm. She hadn't even talked to them, for crying out loud! And no way could Hank, the bar's owner pin that bar fight the month before on her.
Fine, she thought. This bar in Talbot's Peak would probably be much better anyway. For starters, it wasn't owned by her sister's ex-high school flame. Why, she'd be willing to bet that no one person here had ever even heard of Myra Mazeltov! With that though firmly fixed in her mind, Myra opened the door of her car and stepped out.
Right into the path of a rampaging mastodon.
As she sat quietly sobbing in the back of an ambulance while a totally hunky EMT used a whole box of butterfly bandages to close up the multiple cuts in her scalp, Myra had to admit that maybe she was the one to blame for all her misfortune. After all, only she could get run over by an extinct species of pachyderm in the parking lot of a bar in Montana...