If I seem a little quiet, you can thank my day job. Looming deadlines at work have petrified me, and I mean rendered me so wooden that a karate-chopping H.E., a jackhammer, and the combined mass of both aren’t enough to relax the rope-tight muscles in my back. I used to take my breaks regularly to loosen up a little, but since one of us left the fold to work at a job where you’re forced to attend the Grammies in New York and take pictures of celebrities, the rest of us here haven’t been taking our breaks regularly.

During one of the few times that I have taken a walk, one of the women who went with me brought up a topic very near and dear to my heart, as well as my lungs and surrounding arteries. I’m not sure how to explain it. I suppose I could call it Death Gasps, but no one reading this would understand what I mean.

Okay, have you heard of the universal fight or flight instinct? When death looks us in the eye, adrenaline rushes in our veins and pushes us to either fight or flee. This was all developed and discovered before the emergency phone number 9-1-1, else there’d be a third option to go with those two, I’m sure, but as it stands when it comes to instinct there are just those two.

H.E. swears that I do neither. When danger looms, I suck in all the oxygen on earth and produce a high and keening primal sound that runs a chill down his spine; in other words, I gasp like an industrial-strength Hoover vacuum cleaner.

H.E. can’t stand when I do that. If I see a car on a collision course with us, and it’s in his blind spot, I’ll gasp like it’s the last breath I’ll ever take, my eyes as large as saucers and my mouth gaping open for all the bugs to fly in. It’s not intentional; it just happens, an instinct. Yet H.E. can’t stand it because it makes his hair stand on end and because he knows there’s danger but can’t tell from where. All he knows is that something bad is about to happen and that all of the oxygen in the car somehow made its way into my lungs.

“Why can’t you say, ‘There’s a car coming in behind us to your right!’?” H.E. always asks, and I always have to explain that all of those words are too much of a mouthful and that the gasp is much more succinct. He doesn’t like that excuse, but really what does he know? In the same situation, he always says, “Watch your back!” and I can never tell if that means I should stay still or move out of the way, and if so, to the front, to the side or to the back? Of course we all know that he doesn’t literally mean “watch your back” or I’d have a broken neck right now from trying.

Well, anyway, I found out that I’m not the only one who does those death gasps. One of the women I walk with revealed to me that she does that, something she—to her chagrin—has inherited from her mother. We are not proud of the fact that we gasp uselessly in the face of death, but we aren’t ashamed to admit it either. But it did make me wonder…

When faced with danger what do you, dear reader, do instinctively?

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