Morning Accident

by Mike Robertson

Moments after the bullet struck him, he woke from what seemed an odd sort of sleep, confused and a little alarmed. He sat up and looked around. His surroundings were familiar but … different. Something about the colors. And contrast. Perspective seemed sharper, deeper, everything more immediate.

He didn’t know what had happened. He just knew he had blacked out and now he was awake and things were …different. “What happened?” This to himself, as there was nobody else around at the moment.

His shirt collar felt wet. He touched it with his hand and brought his fingers up to his eyes. Bright red. Very bright, very wet. He felt his neck: there it was, flowing. Bleeding. He knew he should be alarmed. Or something. It seemed like it must be serious, must be a problem. He was hurt. Bleeding. But there was no pain. He swallowed, to test his throat. No pain, no constriction. He checked his breathing: normal. Heart? He felt the pulse in his wrist. That seemed okay too. Maybe ninety or a hundred beats per minute. That didn’t seem so wrong either. What had happened to him? He stood up.

He was where he expected himself to be: on the sidewalk in front of the little indie coffee shop he favored, about a block away from where he worked. Morning. He was dressed for work but he was pretty sure he hadn’t gone there yet. He always stopped at this shop on his way in the morning.

He heard a series of gunshots come from an alley across the street. Very quickly the street seemed filled with police cars, lights flashing, stopped with police jumping out, guns drawn and held low, all heading to the alley. A woman, dressed for a desk job, as he was, stepped out from the coffee shop door and looked at the police, then looked at him. “You’re bleeding!” she said, starting toward him.

“I know. I don’t know what happened. Maybe a stray bullet?” He held his hand over the pulsing hole in his neck.

“Shouldn’t you be laying down? You know, shock…” she seemed to run out of words. “I’ll call an ambulance for you, okay?”

It didn’t seem like something he needed to respond to, so he turned back to watch what was going on in the alley. He heard shouting, then another shot. Then silence.

When he turned back, the woman was gone. A man stood in the doorway, body shielded by the door frame, watching the police. “Did she …” he started to ask, but the man ignored him. Whatever he was going to ask seemed unimportant at that moment, so he sat down on the curb, still holding his neck. His hand felt very wet. He was doing the best he could do. The best thing seemed to be to just stay quiet and wait. He settled down, facing the street, butt on the curb, legs crossed under him. He shifted his back until his spine felt straighter and just waited.

The sounds of things became very interesting. Every sound had some kind of after effect, a faint repeat or echo. Not so faint, he decided. Very clear. “Reverb.” The word came to him from a manual that he’d read recently that came with a new home stereo he had purchased. It had a control that allowed him to select how much and what kind of reverb he wanted to hear. A smaller room might need a bit of it, it had said, and a larger room less, since it would have its own natural reverb or sound reflections. This street, the buildings on both sides, and cars, orders being barked, sirens, all had powerful echos here. Deep reverb. He hadn’t noticed that before. He loved it. The more he heard, the more of it he wanted to hear.

He had a thought: “I should get help. I may be dying.” He tried to hold the thought but it passed, the way trivial comments by his fellow office workers often passed, through him and gone, not worth the effort to hold on to. Then another: “What if I’m already dead? I don’t feel pain though I’m obviously injured, and I don’t seem to be taking all this very seriously.” This thought, too, passed through him gently, easily, followed by its corollary: “If I’m dead, wouldn’t I know it? Wouldn’t I float away or see myself lying on the sidewalk, or something?” But he had to admit to himself that he really had no idea what it might be like to be dead.

He watched what was going on in the street and what he could see of the alley for what seemed a long time. Finally the police returned to their cars and shut off their lights and pulled away, after taping off the alley entrance. Normal traffic resumed. He had taken his hand away from his neck long ago, and wiped his hand and neck the best he could with his handkerchief. The bleeding had stopped. He knew he’d lost a lot of blood, he could see it on the sidewalk behind him. But he didn’t feel weak or in pain or even uncomfortable, except for his butt, which ached a bit from the long sit on concrete.

Finally, not knowing what else to do, he decided to walk back home so he could clean up and check himself in a mirror and change clothes. He might even take today off. He was already so late for work that he might as well just call in sick and relax the rest of the day. After all, the sky was bright, the colors of the sky and clouds brilliant and beautiful, the sounds of the city like music to him today. He deserved to celebrate these feelings. Dead or alive, he didn’t know (and didn’t much care really) but he felt good, better by the minute, and he deserved this, whatever it might be.