Bloody
(An excerpt from a story in progress)
Evelyn coughed once, feeling a thick, warm liquid gather in her throat, and then realized that her legs were pinned under the dashboard with a searing pain that was traveling up her back, and she had the disconnected thought that she had somehow prophesied this: tired, brittle bones snapping.
The steering wheel, dented and dislocated by the impact, was digging into her chest. Blood was trickling from her nose and she breathed through her mouth, feeling more and more dust granules catching on her tongue. She could not feel her left cheek anymore. She felt dizzy, and in her swimming, swirling vision, saw that the red car was a Honda, and over its license plates was a black bumper sticker with “GUILTY!” spelled out in bold letters. Like a faraway phonograph from another time zone, the red car’s radio was still running, though stuck, playing what sounded like “No breathing... No breathing...” over and over and over again, and Evelyn, in the heady, muffled state of quasi-rational thought, wondered if she was really meant to die like this, violently, mannishly, entwined in twisted metal and covered with broken glass, with some unknown dead character of an indeterminate origin that flew towards her in an overturned and bashed-in Chariot of Fire, making her look like a blatant coagulation of blood like the incubus that would never be a part of her, telling her that she was guilty, and rubbing in the fact that she was suffocating painfully, blocked by an unforgiving fate at the fork of a junction: some obscure, has-been, barren writer who didn’t even think of gassing up before taking a drive to nowhere.
[Image credit]
Evelyn coughed once, feeling a thick, warm liquid gather in her throat, and then realized that her legs were pinned under the dashboard with a searing pain that was traveling up her back, and she had the disconnected thought that she had somehow prophesied this: tired, brittle bones snapping.
The steering wheel, dented and dislocated by the impact, was digging into her chest. Blood was trickling from her nose and she breathed through her mouth, feeling more and more dust granules catching on her tongue. She could not feel her left cheek anymore. She felt dizzy, and in her swimming, swirling vision, saw that the red car was a Honda, and over its license plates was a black bumper sticker with “GUILTY!” spelled out in bold letters. Like a faraway phonograph from another time zone, the red car’s radio was still running, though stuck, playing what sounded like “No breathing... No breathing...” over and over and over again, and Evelyn, in the heady, muffled state of quasi-rational thought, wondered if she was really meant to die like this, violently, mannishly, entwined in twisted metal and covered with broken glass, with some unknown dead character of an indeterminate origin that flew towards her in an overturned and bashed-in Chariot of Fire, making her look like a blatant coagulation of blood like the incubus that would never be a part of her, telling her that she was guilty, and rubbing in the fact that she was suffocating painfully, blocked by an unforgiving fate at the fork of a junction: some obscure, has-been, barren writer who didn’t even think of gassing up before taking a drive to nowhere.
[Image credit]
posted by Maryanne Moll | 12:02 AM
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