Member-only story
A Crash, a Breath, the Edge of Death
How a near-fatal moment changed my life.
The highway lay vacant that January day, a river of asphalt promise under a winter sky smudged with dying light. I eased forward, intent on my upcoming vacation.
Then — a rupture in reality.
A car sliced through the dusk, its swerve a violent interruption. Metal screamed. An immense force slashed through me, the seatbelt a vise, the airbag a blinding white explosion. Time folded in on itself. A breath — gone. My body catapulted sideways, gravity shifting. My brain skidded against the walls of my skull. A sound, like the world tearing in half.
The alarm shrieked a relentless, monotonous wail — mechanical, unfeeling. Steam coiled into the frozen air, ghostlike, whispering of combustion, of the potential for fire. The radiator giving up its blood.
Pain unspooled inside me, raw and lacerating. Every inhale, a blade split through my ribs. I was trapped beneath the collapsed remains of the engine block; my beloved Toyota pickup folded around me like a broken tree trunk claiming its last possession.
Shadowed figures. Movement. Voices, urgent and overlapping, tethered me to consciousness.
“Someone kill that damn alarm!”
