Drive Safely

More old stuff: the blogger's solution to an utter lack of inspiration.

With all of the lights flashing red and white, it would have been festive. Would have, if it wasn't just the constant flash of alternating tail lights and break lights in the stop-and-go hubbub of the town. The cars were clotting up the roadways like cholesterol in a trouble-bound aorta, every new set of tires hitting the street just a build up to the bursting point.

It was always like this around the holidays; instead of spending time at home with their families, everyone was cursing in bumper to bumper traffic, cutting each other off and running redlights with a predictable regularity that made the offenses boring and run of the mill. It stripped each of these life-threatening acts, these callous moments of disregard, of every bit of shock value until it was just another asshole endangering someone's life. Half of the time the folks running red, children in the back seat, weren't even quick about it, didn't even look sneaky or ashamed. The new unspoken rule wasn't that we'd all abide by the rules of the road, but rather that we'd stop and look both ways before daring to go on green.

I was pressing the tip of a Marlboro to the red-hot coils of my car's cigarette lighter. The tobacco ignited in a flash of brilliant orange, curled black paper dissolving away like the tender alveoli of my lungs. I brought the thin white stick to my lips, using the other hand to press the horn at an SUV who was sticking half of the way out into my lane, insistent on edging his way into the tie-up so he could wait somewhere else. As I inhaled, I could feel the hot smoke curl down my trachea and blossom in my lungs, more satisfying than air and yet somehow less substantial as well. As twin plumes of pale grey curled from my nostrils, I fancied that I had become the traffic dragon, some surly beast laying in wait until one more idiot incurred my fiery wrath.

When the light turned green, I inched up to the bumper ahead of me, eager to get through this time around. I was midway through the intersection when my peripheral vision caught a flash of motion to the left. It was the only warning I received before the Chevy collided with the driver's side door. I remember thinking how funny it was; something that crumbled like a ball of tinfoil on impact made so much noise! Steel shouldn't collapse like that, so it must have been something else - paper, aluminum - than hit my side so hard that I found myself in the passenger side a moment later, head pressed against the window and elbow jammed between the seat and the frame.

I don't know if I blacked out or what, but in what only seemed like seconds later, there were sirens in the distance. My side felt strange, too many angles and fluidity all at once, like I was a leaky plastic garbage bag filled with broken bottles and their former contents. I could feel the cigarette, still pressed snugly between my index and middle finger, littering ash all over my skin as my shaking hand attempted to lift it once more to my lips. Something was wrong though; my elbow was stuck, my wrist felt strangely limp.

So I lowered my head, feeling for the first time the gritty sensation of the safety glass pressed into my cheek and scalp, glued in tight by coagulated blood. When I finally was able to clumsily close my lips over the Marlboro, I couldn't get the suction I wanted, the smoke just leaking in - unsatisfactory. And when I tried to exhale, I was no longer the traffic dragon, but something different - an incense burner, with little tendrils of smoke rising from the dark red patches on my broken-bottle side. When the lights started flashing in the distance, reflecting off of the dark blood pooling in the side-door ashtray that I'd dropped my cigarette into, I again found myself thinking, how festive.