Red Pavement
First published in The Tundish Review, Issue Two, 2017
From a distance she looks like a mummy, sitting quietly beneath the decrepit lemon tree. The sun is setting low above her bandaged head. A lady in white makes trips out to her at short intervals, bringing her blankets and magazines, various snacks and drinks, none of which is ever asked for. Other than that, the girl is alone with the sky.
The clouds are alive with fantastic ribbons of pink and orange, red, yellow and purple. The sky is a one-man band performing a show for the world below. It is playing every instrument all at the one time. It is a proud maestro of dying warmth.
“The colours are beautiful, dear,” says the white lady, on her fifth or sixth trip out to the lemon tree that afternoon. She lays down a magazine that will not be read.
“I’m sure they are,” says the girl.
There are no more tears to be shed beneath the blindfold of bandages. Her eyes have dried up for good and refuse to continue running.
She is silent now.
Headlights flashing, wide as animal eyes.
Seatbelt teeth clenching.
Windows and windscreen bursting like blood vessels, veined and broken.
Blood, real blood, all over the pale pavement. Too much of it to wrap a dazed and concussed head around. But there’s enough of it pooling on the ground to mean somebody’s dead or dying. And the latter is only fragile optimism.
Bones are breaking, important ones.
A head hits the dashboard.
An air bag is running late, then decides not to show up at all.
A body is thrown through the windscreen like a brick.
A heart in the backseat has stopped beating.
All that blood, crawling around in the gutter.
The man in the sky plays only one instrument now. He has thrown all his others by the wayside. His song has become almost deafening.
The sky is mostly red now. It floods and crowds and drowns its neighbours and friends. Maybe it’s better she can’t see it, the red that dominates everything.
She sits there, clutching the new armrest she’s still getting used to.
Those important bones belonged to her.
She sits there, picking leaves off the rickety arms of the old lemon tree. She rips and tears the leaves into tinier and tinier pieces. They fall to the grass in a mosaic pattern, a collage of chaos that goes unnoticed.
Shattered glass lies splintered on the street. Uniformed men block off the area from oncoming traffic. Horns are bleating and blaring impatiently in the night. The strangers are desperate to get home after a long working day.
Somebody’s been taken away in a bag.
Someone else on a stretcher.
There’s a third somebody stuck in the car, still breathing.
Nobody’s crying yet. That comes later.
Somebody’s not making it home in time for tea.
Someone else is going to be stuck in her seat beneath a dying lemon tree.
