Crash
A black burnt-out car frame is the only thing I can see in the hall. It’s a cavernous room, giant, held up by thick concrete pillars and lit by thin strips of neon blue lights. I can’t see the walls …the edges just fade into darkness. I’m moving around, but I feel more I’m looking at a painting, like this room isn’t really here. The car frame comes closer or draws further away but its shadow doesn’t seem to move. I feel like it’s familiar somehow. But not like I know it, more like it knows me. As though I am a fragment of something important that happened to it.
I glide towards it. The scars left by the fire that burned it are as obvious as bulging tumours. The metal on the bonnet is crumpled, like it smashed into something. The number plate is scorched and bent up, but I can make a thick black ‘J’ on one end. This car didn’t have a ‘J’ on the number plate. Wait, how do I know that? And why is that end of the number plate perfectly clean when the rest is scorched out?
I see a trail of blood blotches around the floor that I hadn’t noticed before. It’s dried, it looks like the burgundy footprints of death traipsing round the vehicle. The blood looks thin, and smells of alcohol.
“There’s a tree”
I reel backwards, the shrill metallic voice shredding through my eardrums. The hall spins like a wasp around me, buzzing and flashing blue lights, then I hear a crunch of metal and shattering glass and see coloured spots everywhere like a bad trip.
I think I died in this car. No, that’s not right …
My vision stabilises. I notice bouquets of flowers, a patchwork of blue and red and purple petals, around the back wheel of the car. The rubber of the tyre is spongy and melted, the hubcap charcoal black. I float inexorably towards the flowers. I must be dead. I have to be. Those flowers have to be for me.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. I hear wood banging repeatedly behind me, but I don’t seem to be able to turn round. I feel like I am on the first rise of a rollercoaster, being dragged upwards, unable to see anything but the sky, anticipate anything but the screaming chasm of the inevitable drop. Icy cold tingles against me, and a pounding sick pain swirls in my head, it feels like a hangover. I remember those, I think I got them a lot.
I’m looking at the flowers. They’re arranged in patterns. That one looks like a train, another one looks like a football. I didn’t like those things.
There’s a picture on one of the ordinary bouquets, a scrawny blond child, a little boy. Looks about five. Wide smile showing loads of teeth. I see another photo of him, where he’s being hugged by —
Me.
Nausea bulldozes through me like a tsunami. My head’s spinning and I can see a road slick with whisky slaloming across my vision, like I’m trying to drive and sliding all over the liquid. I was only going to have one but then it tasted so good, well, no it didn’t but it tasted necessary because I missed Frank. I thought about Frank because he would have gone to pick Sammy up from the birthday party, but he wasn’t there anymore. I knew he wasn’t there because of me and how I am and how I made him hurt me because I wasn’t a good wife. I needed my head numb to him. So I got my head good and numb, but then he still wasn’t there so I had to go and pick up Sammy, oh god Sammy…
The next memory hits my head like a pulse, sending me spinning again. The courtroom is packed and a video from someone’s phone is playing on a screen, my car — me — smashing into a Jeep. They know I’m guilty and I know I’m guilty and they’re just making me relive it again for the sick sadistic pleasure, I’m certain of it. I’m shaking and I want to scream at the judge.
“Give me a drink!”
Now Frank’s speaking. Prosecution character witness, testifying to my pathetic existence. Defence doesn’t ask him about the bruises and the baseball bats. No evidence of it, they said. It’ll make you look like a liar as well as a drunk.
Now I’m in the car again, Sammy’s crying, I’m swerving away from the Jeep but I’ve turned the wheel the wrong way and swerved into it. Then I’m coming to and I’m sweating and the car’s on fire and Sammy’s head’s lolling and there’s a huge red splash on the window and I know I’m a cockroach that doesn’t deserve to live. I reach over to try and cuddle Sammy’s limp little body and wait for the fire to take us both away together. But then there are arms, demons, pulling me out of the car even as I howl at them to leave me, let me go.
The memories fade and I stumble backwards. I can’t feel my body, I’m not sure I have one. Hot guilt surges through every inch of me and I know that I’m dead, and this is hell-
A black burnt-out car frame is the only thing I can see in the hall. It’s a cavernous room, giant, held up by thick concrete pillars and lit by thin strips of neon blue lights. I can’t see the walls anywhere…the edges just fade into darkness. I’m moving around, but I feel more I’m looking at a painting, like this room isn’t really here. The car frame comes closer or draws further away but its shadow doesn’t seem to move. I feel like its familiar somehow…
Monitoring Officer Simmons leaned in to the small Perspex window set into the pod and peered over his glasses. Vital signs normal. Eyelids fluttering slightly. Body stock still as the drips fed it intravenous ooze, and the electrodes looped the illusions in its brain. He stepped back and checked through the boxes on his sheet, inscribing neat little ticks next to each one. He liked to make sure all the tick was inside the box each time.
He reached the final question. Any signs of inmate disturbance? He peered through the window again. Inmate seemed to be sweating. He glanced as far down the length of the body as he could. The hands were clenched into fists. Probably just some automatic muscle spasm or something. And the sweat was probably illusory, this Perspex stuff always needed cleaning. He penciled a thick black tick next to ‘No’.
He surveyed the pod. Dust coagulated around the top. An image of a number plate projected from a screen overhead, obscured but for a chunky J at one end — looked like half a U probably. Must be a driving offence, sentence would be served when the full number plate was clean. Out of curiosity he tapped a few buttons on the pad next to the pod. Then recoiled and wiped his hand over his trousers, trying to dispose of the dirt he’d inadvertently exposed it to. Inmate killed her own child drunk driving. There weren’t enough times she could be made to relive that as far as he was concerned.
He took out his camera, snapped a picture of the number plate for the daily log, and moved on to the next pod.
This story was based on this week’s writing prompt:
