A two thousand, seventy-five-pound
vehicle moving at a rate of forty miles per hour comes into contact with an
immovable object. The momentum is strong enough to bend iron. The force of the impact,
so severe, steel rips like paper, bone rips like skin.
Momentum is Mass and
Velocity
Christopher Benedict
blasted his music as he cruised down curvy West Peachtree. He cranked it up and
sang along—the life ahead of him filled with those rose scented curls of
Charlene Clementine whose lips were still moist from their first kiss.
Christopher cranked the radio again and his joyous voice boomed along
Peachtree. The half-moon sparkled over the darkened Atlanta streets and
Christopher smiled. The road turned forty-nine degrees to the right in a slow
uphill arc. Christopher didn't follow it. He zoomed zero degrees north by
northeast and the curb jolted him to attention. Along the straightest path he
could manage he leapt over the sidewalk and destroyed his yellow Honda Civic on
the grandest telephone pole in Fulton County.
The frayed and green seatbelt hugged his left shoulder
and his right hip. It burned his shirt and tore his skin. Unbridled, he
twisted. Christopher torqued. He bowed. He kissed his cold steering wheel. His
zygomatic bone took the brunt of the contact. His cheek shattered as the
radiator absorbed the same impetus. Bone and steel are strong, but the momentum
brought his nose in contact with the horn. His septum mirrored his oil tank,
which deviated to the left. The tank and his nose busted and ripped sending
warm, viscous flows of petroleum and blood. Then the windshield, as fragile as
brain tissue, cracked and jostled inside its protective frame. The engine
folded and ripped, but the Honda halted before the windshield was shattered—any
additional velocity and Christopher’s eye would have been pushed into his
brain. He would have been obliterated beyond repair.
He
kissed the steering wheel and sat upright in his seat and a copious flow of hot
hemoglobin and iron collected on the smooth cotton of his favorite black
t-shirt. He unbuckled his seatbelt and peeled it back, disengaged it from the
dermis.
“Oh shit,” he said.
The
door was stuck.
“Oh,
shit,” he said.
He
crawled over the emergency brake, collapsed on the grass, and backed onto the
car to use it as leverage to lift himself. Blood poured from his face and
puddled at his feet.
“Oh
shit,” he said.
The
purple Publix sign glowed across the plaza. Christopher left a trail of dark
dollops behind him as he walked toward the payphone, he knew to be bracing the
front of the store next to the pumpkins and firewood.
Charlene Clementine sat
by the sliding glass doors of her apartment remembering the sweet kisses of the
previous hour. She played with her curls and enjoyed the memory of the cinnamon
flavor of Christopher’s lips. She felt the residual warmth of Christopher’s
embrace. Her phone rang.
“Hello?”
“I think I fucked myself up.”
“Christopher?”
“I just hit a telephone pole outside Publix.”
“Where are you now?”
“At the corner of Peachtree and Peachtree.”
“Don't go anywhere.”
Fifteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds later a red
Mercedes convertible pulled across the intersection.
“There’s blood on your upholstery,” he said.
“Get in, I don’t care about that,” Charlene took off her
shirt and handed it to him, “put that on your handsome face.” He buckled in,
she peeled out, and they raced south by southeast down Peachtree.
Fourteen minutes and seventeen seconds later Charlene had
Christopher on a gurney. Sirens wailed. Together they traveled past lesser
emergencies: a kid with alcohol poisoning; a baby with flu symptoms; a regular
with a walker and a cough.
Their hands locked. He remembered her wet lips and soft tongue;
her long curls tickled his left cheek. Their hands squeezed. Her affection
folded over him.
But that didn't stop the bleeding.
Christopher’s adrenaline drained and he lost the ability
to move his neck.
Thirty-seven minutes earlier Christopher had listened to
the radio. He'd zipped away from her apartment, high on life and whiskey, her
sweet breath still fresh on him, the smell of roses permeated his everything.
One minute and seventeen seconds after that he had pushed fate straight through
a pole on the corner of Peachtree and Peachtree at exactly zero degrees, north
by northwest.
The gurney rolled down
the white-ceilinged, fluorescent hall and Christopher thought first of
Charlene, but the impact of the crash was inescapable and his body stiffened:
fear gripped his muscles; his tendons lost their elasticity; his toes tightened
as he white-knuckled his way down the corridor escorted by the prettiest woman
in Georgia, his hand wrapped around her hand, his Honda wrapped around the pole
on Peachtree and Peachtree.
He’d had one and a three quarters of a second to learn
everything he knew about physics as Atlanta’s finest pole had approached him
with the aggression of a tiger. He had understood momentum is mass and
velocity—to swerve was to die. If he had chosen to spin, he wouldn't have
kissed his nostril goodbye, instead it would have been his head. If Christopher
hadn't raced straight in at zero degrees the Civic would have bounced, the
impetus would have made it careen. The car would have hit the front then the
side then the back, jerking Christopher's head in three directions. The
steering wheel would have knocked him out as he hit the top-right quadrant of
his forehead and cracked his frontal bone. The car's momentum would have
continued and his body would have been pulled across his seat, the belt would
have held him as his head bent sideways. His neck would have snapped once on
the second hit and again on the third. The third hit would have flung him into
the driver-side window, his head would be broken, the window would be broken.
Shards of hard glass would have entered his ear and cheek as his jaw turned to
mush. Christopher would be dead.
But he'd held strong. He'd moved his right foot three and
two-thirds inches to the left and applied his brake. He'd smashed straight into
the pole. He'd sat up and looked ahead. He'd thought there was a good chance
the car would explode.
The center of his
steering wheel had peeled back his right nostril when his car bounced across
the sidewalk and his face was flung into the horn. This small fact was all the
doctor's assistant seemed to notice.
"The first thing we'll have to do is sew his nose
up," she said.
"What do you mean?" Christopher asked,
"what's happened to my nose?"
"What hasn't happened to your nose?" Charlene asked.
"It seems I've ripped it clean off!"
The assistant said, "This is going to hurt."
Christopher hollered as she folded his nostril back into
place and inserted the needle through and back. She repeated this move eleven
times, each time eliciting a wail.
"Could you please keep it down, you’re disturbing
the other patients."
Christopher hollered again.
The assistant reached for a syringe and pumped him with
two hundred and fifty milligrams of dilaudid. Charlene reached for him as his
body relaxed and he fell deep into an opiated dream.
Fulton’s finest telephone pole had been as well-lit as a
rock star. It was even brighter in memory. It was frozen in time. The telephone
pole, so unlike a deer in the headlights, awaited the inevitable.
Christopher woke up several hours later. A plastic collar
held his head in place and tepid sweat coated him from his mangled face to his
distant legs. The white walls wobbled and stretched across the floor at
thirty-eight degrees. The room was dark and empty. Christopher blinked.
“Charlene?”
His face in the full-length mirror at the end of the wall
was bruised and black. Welts and bumps covered his cheek and mouth. A black
ring traced the circumference of his right eye. His olfactory nerves were
turned off to the agony of being rendered to elimination. His loose teeth were
so numb he didn't yet realize they had been involved. His eyeball was beyond
repair, the lens bent, but saved from obliteration by the broken protrusion of
his brow. Machines gurgled and beeped. He was altered. For Charlene he had been
spared. For Charlene he lay in his bed, splintered and sewn.
“Christopher?”
Charlene made her way across the room. Her hard-soled
shoes announced each step on the wooden floor. He opened his good eye and there
she was: her pearl skin and deep brown eyes; her odd little freckled nose; her
long curly hair that hung over him as she stooped to be close. Christopher
opened his blanket to her. She eased onto the bed and snuggled him, placed her
head on his chest and stretched her small hand across his stomach.
“Are you comfortable?” he asked.
Ariel Basom
Ariel Basom lives in Seattle. He is an avid reader who believes reading precedes writing. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. His work has appeared in Pif Magazine, The Pitkin Review, Monkey Bicycle, and more. Some of his favorite pastimes include cooking, baking, thrifting, and traveling
Tags:
Short Fiction