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Collision Course

Posted on November 20, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

It turned out that people didn’t jump out of the way like they did in the Hollywood movies when a speeding car came at them at way too many miles-per-hour to stop short of hitting them. They just stood there and stared, frozen like a Madame Tussauds waxworks tableau that could appear lifelike but was for all effects and purposes, very fake and very dead; which is exactly what the people in the path of his car became when over a ton of metal collided with their one hundred and fifty pound frames. He saw it all, their surprised expressions of cartoon shock and the almost courteous way in which they folded up into elaborately choreographed shapes of the crash test dummies steamrolled like so many pins making contact with a metal bowling ball on wheels.

It was very clear that the bloodied woman smeared across his windscreen was very dead. Her eyes still staring like those of an owl seeking a mouse meal in the pale moonlight. The man was flung away like a helium-filled balloon being poked away by a mischievous child trying to make it go pop and the little boy…he was the worst. His arm had sheared off and it flapped from the spot over the right rearview mirror like a desperate lane changer wanting to signal his intention to go left. Only he had gone right.

And smashed right into the concrete divider that began a fresh stretch of separating the right lane from the wrong side of the road after a narrow break through which pedestrians crossed. Three of those pedestrians had been bludgeoned by his one-thousand-plus horsepower battering ram before it had folded up into something between an accordion and one wing of an obstinate bowtie. As if as an afterthought the car’s horn began blaring, as if it remind itself that it was making an unscheduled swerve.

He felt his knees drive back into his thighs and he knew that there were finely ground chips of bone where two fully functional joints had been not so long ago. He felt the yaw of impact draw him forward even though his seatbelt was intent on keeping him pressed back against the seat. His neck went at the exact same moment that the car finally, mercifully stopped moving and the steering column broke off and impaled him like a fallen warrior in the movie version of 300.

Nobody dared go near the crashed vehicle because they couldn’t bear to look at what had become of the boy who was killed in the accident. They had no idea how a car that was speeding by at well over sixty kmph suddenly slammed into pedestrians waiting to cross the road before dying a messy death from contact with a block of concrete fastened to the ground.

Nobody would ever find out that he had been driving home after a hard day at work and for no good reason at all, he thought of her, his ex-girlfriend. He remembered how she had looked at him the day she told him she was leaving and he remembered being surprised because he was still overcome with passion for her and he hadn’t even been able to see any other women because of how she made him feel. He asked if there was someone else and she had put a hand on his left shoulder and told him it didn’t matter and that he really didn’t want to know. He had let her walk way without a backward glance that time.

Tonight he shrugged away the memory of her hand; violently. And in so doing, he wrenched the wheel of his car, at the same time.

The rest, as the say, is front-page news.

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