October 6, 2019.
SPOOKTOBER STORY #4:
On the morning of April 08, 2020, Lisa Graham tripped over her shoelaces, but was relatively graceful in her fall, landing on her right forearm and scraping up her wrist only a little. "Yowch!" she exclaimed, but it hadn't really hurt. No real damage, not even a torn sleeve. She was embarrassed, collecting things back into her purse before looking up, which she only did to locate the source of the screams that began to fill the morning air.
Lisa's individual tumble was graceful, but not everyone was so lucky. The "Great Trip," as it came to be called, caused serious and lasting injury to 1/5 of the human race, and counting industrial, vehicular, and other accidents, over three hundred million people worldwide died on the day of the Great Trip.
"It was as if some malevolent force had pressed 'pause', tracked down every human being on Earth, no matter how remote, tied all our shoelaces together, then unpaused and just watched the resultant chaos," summarizes Dr. John Illnich, a historian and collector of Great Trip stories. "Those who were barefoot or wearing only socks at the time found themselves suddenly wearing shoes appropriated from who knows where. Those wearing laceless shoes had them replaced with laced ones."
Not even those without feet were spared. Dr. Illnich's own mother, confined to a wheelchair after her left foot was amputated from diabetes complications, had a sized prosthesis, later determined to be missing from a research laboratory almost 2,000 miles away, attached to her stump, dressed with a pair of Nike Zoom Freak 1s, and tied together in a Yosemite bowline knot. Thankfully, as she was sitting in her wheelchair at the time, she didn't trip, as so many others did that fateful day.
After Lisa Graham untied her laces, stood, and retreated from danger, she phoned her family, which is when she learned the grisly truth: her husband Angel and two daughters, Maria and Penelope were dead, having tripped down a flight of stairs, fallen out of a tree, and been crushed by the car of a retired policeman swerving out of the way of a fallen dog walker and her dogs (also wearing compromised shoes), respectively.
Since that incredible tragedy, Lisa has dedicated her life to finding out the cause of the Great Trip, and making sure it doesn't happen again.
What will she do, if she finds the event was caused by a single "trickster," as Dr. Illnich proposes?
"I've got shoes of all sizes," she tells our reporter. "And industrial strength laces. And a working knowledge of all the most dangerous, steepest, deadliest staircases in every major city on Earth. If I ever find this son of a [expletive], it's [expletive] payback time."