The Accident

Carla opened her eyes the next morning, the horrifying events from the previous night still fresh in her brain. She could not believe what had happened, and no one would believe her if she tried to explain. She had been driving down Michigan Avenue, on her way to a wedding, or that’s what she thought. It was there that her night had turned upside down.

The car in front of her stopped in the middle of the road and caused confusion for all the cars around her. The angry drivers behind her honked their car horns with impatience. They all went around this car, which trapped Carla in. She saw the driver’s door of the car in front of her. A black silhouette of a woman stepped out and turned towards Carla’s car. She could not see the person very clearly. The woman, her head down, started walking towards Carla. Carla immediately reached for the lock on the door. She looked to see if the traffic was still coming and it was, so she was not going anywhere. Her eyes looked up from the steering wheel to find this strange woman staring at her through the window. Her heart jumped through her chest and she felt as though it was sitting right there on the floor. The woman reached for the door handle and pulled. Carla’s palms and forehead dripped with beads of sweat. She was so confused and just wanted this to be over. The locked door opened with ease. She sat down in the passenger seat without saying a word.

Just then, Carla felt a sharp pain shooting through her wrist and looked down to find a very peculiar sight. There was a glass shard lodged into her arm and there was no evidence of how this had happened. There was no blood on her arm, just a deep cut yet the pain was immense and unbearable. The more she observed her arm, the more she realized the depth and severity of this wound. Her eyes wandered up and met the blue eyes of the now recognizable person in her car. She knew without a doubt who this woman was, but she did not know how this was possible. Three years ago today Carla’s sister had died in a tragic car accident. The headlights showed Carla that the woman standing in front of her car was her dead sister. She thought she must be dreaming. How else could this be explained?

Carla looked down to check the condition of her still bleeding wrist and at that moment she felt her head whip back and the pressure of the impact sent her flying forward. The glass from the back window flew up towards the driver’s seat and the sound of shattering glass and high shrieks filled the car. Did that shriek come from her? She hadn’t thought so. She looked to her right and saw that her sister was sprawled across the dashboard with her head turned sideways and no movement was detected. Why was this happening again? She had seen this scene a few times in her head when she heard the news of her sister’s car crash. Whenever she had imagined what might have happened, this was exactly what she saw. Her sister being thrown from her seat with blood covering her body was a sight she wish she could unsee. The difference between her imagination and the real life image she was seeing now was that in her imagination she could convince herself she was wrong. None of this made sense.

Carla grabbed her sister’s arm and started shaking her in hope that she would wake up. She wanted her to wake up so bad so that they could have their last conversation, or their last coffee date they never got to have. She thought she lost that chance three years ago but maybe this was a miracle. It did not feel like real life but how could she dream something so real? Just then Carla looked down at herself to check for injuries in case she had been hurt and just had not felt it. There was no damage to her at all, not a scratch, other than the piece of glass that had been in her arm since before the crash. She started to move and shake but she was unaware of what was happening, “Carla! Carla” she heard a voice scream, but there was no one to match the voice as far as she could tell. The world around her began to change. Her eyes felt heavy and all she saw now was the black of her own eyelids. She felt a hand shaking her and she gained the strength to open her eyes. The confusion was what was making her feel weak, or maybe it was the accident. Her eyes opened to see her mother standing over her, but there was something odd. She was not on Michigan Avenue in her wrecked car with her sister. Her attention was drawn to her wrist where the same piece of glass still lay lodged inside her arm. Her mother explained to her that she had fainted and collapsed on top of the coffee table which explained the shattered glass in her arm. Maybe the paramedics would indicate the problem but how would any of this explain the moment she just encountered that felt so real? Her sister was still dead. Carla was still alive. Nothing explained the car crash that she had just experienced. The weird thing was that the car accident that took her sister’s life had happened three years ago, to the minute. There was no way Carla would have known all of the details of the accident as vividly as she had just seen them. There was no explanation to this, and if there was, Carla was not sure she wanted to hear it.