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Saturday, November 15, 2003

"For overspeeding--first offense - I would enlarge the numbers, and make them readable at three hundred yards - this in place of a fine, as a warning to pedestrians to climb a tree."
- Mark Twain on the subject of license plates, originally published in "Harper's Weekly," 11/5/1905 (from a letter to the editor)



FICTION:



Glass Car Crash (part 2)



It was cold out and she was back on the road, taking the turns harder and harder. The ice had cracked every branch it could, splintered sticks and limbs covered the streets and she thought it looked like something big had skimmed over the neighborhood, then decided not to land there after all. Distracted by the debris, she slowed down and took a wider turn on the next corner. She was worried that her car would slide, but she was grinding so much wood under her wheels that she didn't want to stop and deal with a punctured tire. The worst thing was, something in the air around these houses was blocking out the song on the radio. Too many TV antennas? She stepped back on the gas.

She was taking the turns faster and faster, her foot easing off for the stop signs, but still not stopping the car. She thought she might be able to round those corners at that speed forever. She rounded a corner and saw a rusted car in the middle of a farmer’s field. There was snow and ice covering the ground but she could see that someone had plowed around the car. She didn’t understand why someone would leave it out there and work around it through a change of seasons. She considered knocking on the door of the farm house to ask someone but then it was behind her and she was coming into town. She concentrated on speed.

Three turns after the field, her car started sliding. Even though she knew she wasn’t supposed to, she turned her wheel one way and felt her tires slide the other way. There was no control at all. More angry than scared, she released the steering wheel, crossed her arms and closed her eyes. Her bumper clipped a mailbox and the car stopped. She laughed to herself, as if another child had just tagged her and the game was over.

You’re it!

She opened her eyes and saw a small girl ten feet away sitting on half a snowman. She was staring at her. She glared back at the girl for a couple seconds, then reached over and opened her passenger door. She leaned outside and looked at her wheel where it had stopped. Her wheels were tight against the curb.

Then she saw the red.

Bright streaks cutting through the black and brown slush in the gutter. She blinked and took her hand off the door. It started to swing shut by itself and she quickly shoved it open again, hoping now the red was gone. It was still there. She slowly leaned out further and traced its trail to the source. She couldn’t tell what it was. The thing she'd hit wasn't recognizable. Blood. Fur. Cat? Dog? One thing she was sure of, it was that little girl's animal. Her elbow bumped the volume knob and suddenly the static on the radio was a white roar. She reached to turn it down and the door slammed shut.

Why are you trying to bite me?

She opened her driver's side door and put a foot out onto the road. She realized that, from her angle on the snowman, the little girl couldn't see the red comet trail. The curb was hiding everything from her. She was coming over, though. And she’d see everything in about five more steps. She watched the little girl slide sideways off the half snowman, staring intently at something else instead. The little girl started to crunch through the snow towards her car. Now she could see what the little girl wanted.

Her antenna was sticking out of the snow, two feet from the dead thing. And for some reason the little girl wanted it. She quickly got back in her car, started the engine and rolled back several yards. She swatted at the radio knob to turn off the noise and turned it up full-blast instead. In a panic, she opened up the passenger door again and reached out for the dead thing against the curb so that the little girl wouldn’t see it.

She stopped. It was still alive. A long tail was whipping and spasming wildly in the red slush around it. The little girl was two steps closer, and for a moment she thought about grabbing the creature and cramming into the broken mailbox.

The little girl was next to her now, only her eyes visible above a bright green scarf, not quite close enough to read an emotion. Then they were.

The little girl’s eyes reminded her of a time back in college when she was coming home from work and a football had bounced into the street. At the time, she thought that the best way to avoid the ball was by gunning the engine and timing its path to bounce safely between her tires. She was wrong. The football was chewed under with a squawk, gutted and mangled on the screws and works under her car, then left flopping and hissing on the road behind her. She knew how it must have looked, her speeding up like that at the last second. She thought it must have looked deliberate as hell. And she knew there was no way to explain anything to the ones playing the game. It was funny and tragic at the same time, only she realized it was a joke that only she would understand. So she stabbed the gas pedal hard again and tilted her rearview mirror to watch the boys walking onto the road, slowly approaching their dying football in anger and confusion.

The little girl's hand was reaching for something. It hovered in the air, then hooked down to grab the antenna from the snow. She got to it first and threw it back over the little girl’s head into a bush. Then she grabbed the animal, stuffed it into the mail, flipped up the flag on the box, jumped back behind the wheel, turned the static down to a hum, and stomped the gas. Even around the corner, where her heart finally slowed down, the song never came back on and she finally turned off the radio. Then she punched down the rearview mirror so she wouldn't be tempted to look back.

Hours later, red and blue lights on the horizon slowed her back down. She squinted and saw the flash of a yellow light mixed in with the colors. A tow-truck. It was a crash. She coasted into a line of cars corralled in a bottleneck of roadflares and her car was slowed to a crawl. For a crazy second, she wondered if the thing that had clipped those branches above the town had finally landed. She turned off the radio, forgetting about her antenna, then quickly turned it off again. She creeped by the crash, a metal pretzel of glass and metal that woke her up and got her blinking again. She decided to kill time trying to figure out what kind of vehicles were involved in the wreck.

Too many wheels for one car, too much glass for a motorcycle, too much chrome for an airplane, too much rubber for a train. . .

The cop up ahead slowed her line of cars to 3 mph so she had even more time to study it. She decided the crash was confusing her only because the cars inside the wreckage were all the same color. She'd heard somewhere about blue cars being the least likely to have a crash. Apparently that statistic wasn’t counting the times that blue cars crashed into each other.

She tried the radio again and heard a song trying to fight through the noise. She wondered if maybe it was conversations between the cops or firetrucks. Was that possible? She played with the tuner, hoping to decipher the words. She wondered if the cops and firemen ever sang their information like that. Then her line of cars stopped completely and the song was gone.

She slowly turned her steering wheel hand over hand over hand over hand, until her car was pointing at the crash. Then she raised her foot off the brake slow as she could, and started inching towards it. The line of vehicles was loose enough for her to slide out and she was convinced that she was moving slow enough that no one would notice what she was doing.

She needed her car to be just a little closer. A road flare was snuffed out under her tire as she played with the radio knobs, convinced she could find the song coming from inside the crash.



-© 2003 david james keaton

::: david - 9:00 PM [+] :::
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