Lemon, Peeled

Did you lose a fight with a belt sander?
Did a lightbulb explode on you?
Did you like, have a nightmare and wake up while a cat was on your face?

These were all questions Liz heard many times on Sunday. The real story was much more interesting.

She had been a horse rider ever since she was eight years old. Her first horse, an evil-incarnate palomino named Midas, decidedly had some sort of vendetta against children and actively sought to kill her, unseating her on average 8 of every 10 rides. But because her trainer blamed the horse's depravity on her lack of equestrian skill, she became determined to learn, above all, how to stay on a horse's back.

It was over fourteen years later that she took a little refresher crash course-literally- in her childhood riding lessons.

Shootout is a weekend event that happens every year at Barefoot University. Groups of students come together to make 3-5 minute films in 48 hours, based on a few prompts given to them by the school.

The genre that Liz's group was assigned was a western, so the team journeyed to Stone Mountain, Georgia (home of Kenneth Parcell). Since a moving galloping shot was required for the sake of the story, and the owner of Stone Mountain was Liz's best childhood friend, she offered her services as a stunt rider and mounted up.

Sure, the weather was not optimal for a hard gallop. Sure, the ground was slick with mud and ice. Sure, she was riding in a tight space between a moving pickup truck and a fence on a hill. Sure, she could have ridden slower or stopped sooner.

But that would have made too much sense. Instead, she chose to hit the patch of mud with a horse running at nearly full speed, which is plenty fast enough to be considered break-neck speed. The last thing Liz remembered was her horse's feet slipping out from under her.

The next thing she saw was sky. It came in fuzzily as she blinked herself back to the world. Then she heard a voice. It was that of her best childhood friend, Rachel Dratch. Rachel, always sympathetic to a grim situation, said the first thing Liz remembered hearing:

"Well, don't you look like a rock star."

Liz gurgled back a response like, "rock on." She tried to sit up, but a pair of hands pushed her down in the mud. Then she heard Jenna's voice.

"You can't get up, hun. You had a bad fall."

Slowly the story came out while Liz was on the ground. Her horse had slipped and fell, throwing Liz headfirst into the road. She'd hit the pavement hard, rolled over, and blacked out for a few seconds. Then she was overcome with a seizure like something from The Excorcist.

At that point, everything went into crisis mode. Pete lunged twenty feet in the air out of the film truck while the driver slammed on the breaks. Rachel grabbed the horse and handed it off to one of the crew members, who took it inside the barn. As he opened a stall door to put the animal away, a miniature horse flew out and ran, bucking, into the chaotic swirl outside.

Jenna would later comment that while she was crouched on the ground, holding Liz still, she turned her head to clear her tears and saw a tiny horse running across her field of view and three crew members chasing after it.

Liz regained consciousness shortly before the ambulance arrived, but with dizziness and slurred speech. So they packed her up and shipped her off to the hospital, Rachel and Jenna in tow. After a few hours, a cat scan, x-ray, and one nurse Ratched who taped her head to the backboard, Liz was released with a fistful of vicodin and a massive headache. She slept well that night and bounced back to work the next day, her scratched face a real conversation starter.

Everyone was glad she was alive, to say the last, and Liz received various get-well presents, including a massive bag of cheese puffs, free calzones, and a box-mask to hide her face.

One night Dennis popped up on IM to ask her what happened. As she told her story, his responses came further and further apart, until she realized that he had lost interest. Ah well, she thought. You just can't make some people care. Those that do are worth keeping around- if only to cash in on the occasional free foods.