Out of the Black - Lee Doty [36]
She thought it ironic that she would in all likelihood die prostrate before an open refrigerator. She wondered briefly what her obituary would look like. Well, at least Elvis had it worse.
She felt a weight above her, slowly pressing her back, out of the light. Back to somewhere below the floor, where an enfolding darkness waited. And in that darkness, she knew the dead man was still waiting. She knew because she could hear him calling her name.
Down, into the darkness: floating, falling, and then her eyes opened to reveal a familiar white mist above her. The carpet was gone and she now lay on a bed of wild, unmowed grass, the sound of wind around her. It was the sound of loneliness- air moving through the chambers of a hollow mountain.
She stood up and looked around. She was in the grassy ditch in the median of a six-lane highway by the sea. The cars blurred by; wispy impressions of color and form. The sea was troubled. White waves rolled slowly in, adding a dull roar to the howling wind. The perspective was unsettling: slow moving waves behind the unrealistic speed of cars moving at what appeared to be hundreds of kilometers per hour.
The light seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. Though the misty sky was painfully bright, no sun was available to cast shadows. She seemed to be in the middle of a huge, cloudy fishbowl.
She had been here before. Though she couldn't remember what was next, her heart felt heavy with tragedy, stretched thin with sympathy. Something terrible had happened here, and it was about to happen again.
She squinted into the blurring cars, trying to pick out the van she knew would be here soon. Then time changed and the cars slowed to a crawl, the waves stopped moving. The howling wind dropped to a low hum, barely perceptible at the low end of her hearing. About a hundred meters away, an antique sports car changed lanes before clearing an antique minivan fully. The car clipped the minivan on the front left fender which, together with the evasive swerve the minivan had already begun, drove the minivan toward the median where Anne stood.
Actually, directly toward her, she noticed with a start.
She tried to move, but her legs were made of wood and rooted to the ground. She brought her arms up in slow motion, covering her face as the minivan barreled toward her, throwing divots of grass from locked wheels.
Then the slow motion ended and the minivan rushed her at full speed. She didn't scream as it hit her, but then she really didn't need to as her perspective shifted. When she opened her eyes, it seemed the car had picked her up like a mid-crash hitchhiker. She was now riding in the back seat behind the driver. Out of the frying pan...
The slow motion perspective was back as she looked around the interior of the doomed minivan. A middle-aged man was wrestling with the steering wheel, his graying hair tossing about as he tried to save his family. The minivan swerved, fishtailing and bouncing over the uneven turf, with each swing of the van's tail getting wider. There was a woman in the passenger seat, apparently startled out of sleep by the unfolding accident.
Anne felt a sympathetic pang in the chest as if this were her own mother. She hated to see her so scared, wanted to reach out and touch her, hold her, tell her it was going to be all right. But she knew it wouldn't be. That's why Anne was here... because it wasn't going to be all right.
The woman twisted left, reaching over her partially reclined seat, toward the child behind her. Anne followed the direction of the woman's futile grab and saw first the small metal crutches on the floor behind the passenger seat, then the child just coming out of sleep in the back seatv hp>
Her first thought was of a little startled angel. He was maybe eight years old, but she could tell by the expression on his face that something was different. The small downward sloping eyes held a fuzzy innocence she recognized