December is always a challenge for Corey. She was born two weeks after Christmas; as far back as she can remember, her birthday has been a time of party-fatigue, fresh inhibiting New Year’s resolutions, and gifts bought at post-holiday sales that can’t be returned. Everyone else seemed to have birthdays half the calendar away from winter.

Her family was Jewish and didn’t celebrate Christmas. In Protestant San Diego that made young Corey feel left out and ripped off. She didn’t get those net stockings filled with hard candy, let alone a living room with a decorated tree and a pile of wrapped packages and tinsel and music and fudge.

As she got older and more retrospective about the past, and more likely to make vows of improvement for the coming year, her approaching birthday cast a tone of review and resolution into December that always resulted in low spirits and often in a head cold.

And to cap all of her complaints, she’d landed in a tax consulting career, which she liked in general, but which meant every December was so busy that she couldn’t find time for the social scene even after she grew old enough to have one of her own.

Viewing Corey in any December, she seems beset and bothered. She tends to forget good posture and scramble from errand to task. She’s often up before her alarm and it isn’t because she’s sufficiently rested. Each list is longer than the one from the day before, mostly because of the items on it that have been moved there from earlier, acquiring a dash, an arrow, and finally a solid underline as they become crucial. Seeing her from above, she resembles a large scrabbling bug. Or a hermit crab, except her burdens are packages and files instead of shelter.

Today is particularly irksome for her. There are less than five shopping days till Christmas/Chanukah, which are coinciding this year. She’s done what she can with gift cards, and she still has at least four presents to acquire. There are three new plan documents to draft before she tries to close the office for the last few days of the year, and there’s one large error to resolve unless she wants to refund a few thousand in fees or face an E&O claim (she has to resolve the issue to everybody’s satisfaction or she’s going to be ashamed of her ability). All those, plus she must do the year-end planning to close her own corporate books, and she has tweaked her lower back again, so she stands like an elderly person and takes initial steps like a spastic toddler.

She’s embarrassed about her back. She knows that’s inappropriate, but it’s true. She acquired the diagnosis (herniated disk between L2 and L3, left side) a year earlier, along with some excellent oxycodone experiences and several sessions of physical therapy. She knows to roll to her side before getting out of bed, and she would never lean forward from a chair and twist at the waist to pick up a weight off the floor. But two days ago she sneezed, first thing in the morning and with some violence, and that’s when she felt the dreadful release of warmth at the base of her spine. She said “oh shit” at the time, she stretched side to side and back and forth and kept moving, but there was no interrupting the consequences of whatever happened. She sensed the inflammation a day later, yesterday, and ibuprofen isn’t easing it. And it’s too much hassle to add narcotics acquisition to her list of projects; O is so controlled that a prescription can’t be phoned or faxed in, and there’s no way she has time to travel cross-town to her doctor’s office for it.

She soldiers on. She figures she has about twenty shopping minutes before she has to get back to the office. She doesn’t think online will work this week; she has to see and touch the gifts she is about to acquire. She regrets the disappearance of stores like the Nature Company and Rand McNally; she’d always been able to find items in shops that featured artifacts and maps and globes. She concludes that the only option now is the big bookstore ahead of her. She waits for the crossing signal while it starts to rain.

She’s wearing a water-resistant jacket but she left her umbrella in the office. The forecast threatened rain later in the day, but the pathetic fallacy seems perfect to her. “Sure,” she thinks sourly as the first drops frizz her hair: “just what I needed to make the day perfect.”

The signal turns green. She steps into the intersection with a crowd of people. She is the only one of them whose shoe slips on the now-moistened streetcar tracks. She goes down.

Like any other pedestrian who falls on the streets of the financial district, she jumps up immediately, refuses the assistance offered by a few strangers’ arms, doesn’t even meet their eyes as she thanks them and hustles to the sidewalk, and keeps walking to get away from the scene of her clumsiness. She brushes at the wet smear along her right thigh. She’ll figure out if any damage was done later.

She is so distracted by her fall (envisioning what it must have looked like from the overhead wires, with herself splayed on her side on the tracks and convulsively contracting her limbs to regain verticality, something like a long-legged insect impeded by a web), that she doesn’t look at any of the oncoming pedestrians. She almost collides with her ex-husband before she recognizes him.