THE CAR
As they left the school, the sound of their shuffling feet hollowed out the silence that canted from whispering tongues and spying eyes as all about them; like the final sprint of a marathon, students and teachers gathered and stood, holding their loud disapproving breaths so as not to expel themselves into the path of volatility as the three walked with their heads held high; bound in conscious blind, towards their waiting car with only The Father looking each and every person coldly in the eye, defending; not his son, but of his own reflection, leading castigating eyes to his intimidating, mastodonic size and away from the toxic lure of his poisoned fruit.
“I honestly don’t know how much more I can take. I tell you, I’ve tried, I really did, but there has to come a point where you just stop trying, don’t you think?” said The Father, casting his disappointment onto The Son for being something for him to blame, the smoke unto which his eyes drew themselves out of warning but through which he could not see.
In the backseat, The Mother was listening to every word but the meaning and hurt from which those words had gathered fell apart before the gentle swishing hairs in her ears could court with their song, so that all her mind could assume, was a strained mumble, a collection of sounds that brought her little sense so she simply stared out of the window in presentable dearth, still holding in her hand, the tiny colored butterfly, twisting it around her fingers and hearing only the sound of crumpling plastic as the toy twisted and turned.
The Father too went retired into his own detention, making himself a comfortable prisoner in his cerebral theatre where his mind pained him with portraits of young, happy girl, her fidgety hands pulling at and picking pieces of dirt out of her straw like, strawberry, blonde hair, her hazel eyes alive and magnetic, inviting him into dare; to cast of his ripened posture and be as a child, eschewed from his instruments of work and buried like her, in the premise of game.
Tears welled in his eyes as the young girl haunting his mind dove at his leg; clawing and climbing and pulling and drugging and begging and wanting and prying and crying and singing and shouting and willing out loud for daddy to play for a while.
His hands clenched the wheel and his breath left the residence of his chest as a long debasing sigh taking part of his soul; the part that carried the face of the girl, out into the open air where it caught wind of its liberation and knew that for this, right now, he was not ready and as he inhaled; the sadness that cancered his hope and meaning, that hollowed out the tone in his voice that once shook with surmounting love, that very same breath he had willed to exude, came rushing back into his body, warming his faintly beating heart with a welcomed cordial depression.
“You still blame me for what happened?” said The Son.
“This is why you’re acting out? Because of what happened to your sister?” said The Father.
“It wasn’t my fault or it was my fault; whatever but you can’t fucking treat me like this. It’s not fair. You’re so fucking quiet. Say something, anything” yelled The Son.
“What do you want me to say? That it’s your fault? You should have been watching her? You shouldn’t have left her there all alone? What do you want me to fucking say?” screamed The Father; his knuckles glowing white as around his twisting fingers, the raging blood that coursed from his spiting heart piled against his skin wanting to burst his fist through something unbreakable.
“You should have been there. You shouldn’t have left us alone. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my…” said The Son, his words trailing into audible absence, disappearing in the onset of The father’s conscious rage, like a grain of salt dropped into an ocean of water.
What he wanted to say was that it was all his fault and that he should rot in hell and suffer worse than what she suffered and that he should feel the horrible hurt that only a father can feel when he has no choice but to think these terrible things. He wanted to say “I hate you”, but all he could muster were the words to his favorite song.
As the old rattling car rattled along the old winding road, its lights flickered intermitting. The smiling, young girl haunting The Father’s mind ran in the garden before him, looking over her shoulder as she ran towards a flaming house that was brighter than the sun, as fire ripped from its belly and blistered the weather boards, retching plumes of thick, choking, black smoke out of the windows and up into the air, making hostage of the sun and the blue sky.
His sight was his beleaguered, crippled companion as before him, the smiling young girl waved her hands invitingly as she looked over her shoulder adoringly before running straight into the thick black plume of smoke and vanishing as a ball of fire swallowed the house, the air, his heart and her invitation.
The Father breathed heavy again, spitting air like crumbs, picked from his nattering teeth. He looked with descending grace at his son who he saw only with the spark of villain, feinting behind a veil of remorse, in the stone of his eyes.
The rattling car rattled some more and all The Father could think of was the smile on his daughter’s face and how each time that he imagined her, her image faded that little bit more. And the only image he could keep in his mind, the only one where the little girl smiled, was the horror that painted how the little girl died.
The Father gripped the wheel.
The Mother clung negating to the colored butterfly.
And The Son stared at the skin on his arm.
The tense air, piled upon The Father’s reserves, taking his reason and having him imagine; in the flicker of light, the abandon of everyone from their suffering.
As The Mother started to weep, The Father hummed his favorite song, the words spitting from his mouth like rasps from the horseman’s whip but unfixed to The Son’s care as he held loosely to the wheel and stared absently out of the window, stretching his soul out onto the white dotted line being crept upon but never over by the flickering beam of the old car’s headlights.
The Mother wept some more, The Father heavied his hum and The Son, lost all control.
“Shut up” he screamed and as he did, his voice cast out through the windscreen and travelled along the white dotted line that raced against the flickering light from the car’s closing eyes, trying to escape the deafening roar of what would be his last breath.
In the wake of his words, a gentle swell of silence washed upon the frozen bodies of The Mother and The Father, whose sadness, disappointment and anger were spoken only of in ambushed fright as the air that swept through their mind; blowing out their conscious fuse like the call of sleep against an evening candle, travelled through and around their strangely contorting bodies, past their mouths agape, across their frozen stares and under the rattling body of the old car as it twisted and turned in midair, dancing with blind grace, into the arms of chance.
The impact was quick.
It was more of a sound than a feeling.
It was the sound of closure.
Of a turbulent moment, crushing to an end.
The glass shattered and the air about them spun in circles. So fast that the trillions of little bits of glass, they hanged in the air before they fell all over them. And they looked more like rain than they did glass. Sure felt like glass, though.
Nothing was said.
Not a sound.
Only the echo of The Son’s belligerent request that they all followed accordingly as the flickering lights on the old rattling car cast its stare in a way that a car should not, seeing the world from such a height that the ill of concern might address as amusing, flashing upon the branches of tree, at first on its side and then upside down and as they twisted and turned; watching the red beam of lights to their front, it looked as if the world were standing on its head, seeing existence through the spinning eye of a washing machine.
And the road went round and round
The flashing lights went round and round.
And the glass, it went round and round too.
And then so did they.
The Mother, though, she didn’t have a bel
t on.
She went round and round the most.
The rattling old car lead by flickering lights smashed into the bitumen, ending the flight of its pirouette through the still, dark night. The Mother screamed. It was loud, but it wasn’t as loud as the sound of metal twisting, ripping and folding around them as the car, caught in the spell of tragedy, flipped and rolled and smashed into a tree, hitting at first, the door where The Son was clinging to in despotic fright and then, like the closing arms of a lover’s embrace, folding around the tree so that the entire car ripped completely in two.
Its engine tore from its mount and flung somewhere down the road into the stretch of flashing amber lights and horrified screams while The Mother was sent through a mesh of broken glass and into the quiet dark, somewhere far from where The Father laid, catching his last breaths under a heavenly stupor.
The silence that threatened their ears was drowned only by the sound of their breathing as The Father and The Son gurgled on the long heavy breaths their bodies fought desperately to take.
In the distance, the sound of panicked voices grew louder as more and more amber lights lit up the night sky but The Father could not tell their origin or the plight of their concern for he was entrenched in every breath, feeling his way in and out of his sunken lungs, the rattling old car like a rattling old cage, shaking his mind off its perch so that it laid with him, somewhere beneath the ruin of which he had no idea he was belonging to at this critical moment at the end of his life.
“It should have been…” said The Son, his face masked in a thousand shards of broken glass, his left hand still clutching the handbrake and death, taking host in his bloodied body.
“What have you done? You killed your mother and your sister. What have you done?” said The Father hurtling every word from his heart.
The Son took his final breath as The Father fought to build enough strength to find the boy’s hand and take it in his own but as he struggled to twitch his fingers; his ears were nursed with a defeated groan, an expelling of half a breath and then, immediate silence.