by onehunna

one of my submissions for the upcoming end-of-2015 deadlines.. previewing it here--lemme know what's good. for more check me out on 406ness.com, where this will be dropping in a few days.

You are hurtling towards death. Time: 2:48 p.m. Mountain Standard on a Friday, March 27. Highway bound, roughly fifty-four minutes outside of Missoula. You are speeding 75 across a mountain-squeezed bend of I-90, overlooking a one hundred foot drop and the St. Regis River. You are squarely sitting shotgun in a maroon ‘08 Crown Victoria, strapped into the seat by a woven polyester belt, anchored by both your reflexive grip on the coat-hanger handle and three-hundred thirty-six metric tons of force. To your immediate left, Dane Alchevy, age 22, is at the wheel, which he has lost total control of. In all likelihood, he was only just trying to be funny. Like how Dane likes to scare people like, ripping the wheel left and right, right and left, fake screaming for his life when----. Directly behind you, seated in back, is Kellan Clemons, age 22, who has ostensibly wet himself, soaking 210 ml of urine through the sedan’s nylon upholstery. You three, young men each, are at this point 60 miles deep into a college road trip, destination Seattle, decelerating to 70 miles per hour. You three, dead men each, are at this point skidding savagely across a loose bed of gravel, searching for spring break everlasting on this warm, sun-soaked afternoon. The Crown Vic which you are seated in is now in an uncontrolled slide in the left-hand lane, currently cocked at a 70° angle in relation to the far side of the road’s right-hanging bend. In four seconds, at 68 miles per hour, the vehicle collides head-on with the concrete Jersey barrier separating Interstate pavement from eternity, and in five flips headlong over the wall, tumbling down the valley in six. In seven seconds, the vehicle meets the ground. In eight you are ghosts.

You led what many might consider to be a ‘decent’ life. Decent meaning you either ‘lived decently’ (see: as a human being) or, that the objective quality of your time on earth could be categorized as ‘decent,’ depending, really, on who you ask--factoring in, of course, the state of this person’s mood/appetite/financial situation at the time of their answering. Sure, there were slip-ups, sins by any account; such as the orchestrated pilfering of Billy Blaize’s holographic Gengar 1st edition Pokémon card (currently fetching 8.16 USD on ebay.com) back in 1998, back on the chaotic asphalt playground of Ambler Catholic; or the spiteful egging of Sarah Cruz’s rusted sedan, the one with the automatic seat belts, back in the tenth grade after being dumped for the first time; or, how after only two beers, you told Ashley Shimoda that you loved her over the phone even when you know you never really meant that shit. But nothing egregious; again, really depending on who you ask and the elapsed time between their last sexual encounter--really nothing unforgivable. But, again again--you had only so much time. And time only had so much you. It was a decent life. From Jessup to Ambler, then Ambler to Baker, and Baker to Shelby, to Seattle; you moved around a bunch as a kid, and so you got to know people pretty quickly and could fit in anyplace. This was a skill you chiefly picked up to survive, to which the alternative likely would have been fist fighting. You repeatedly found yourself becoming probably, obviously, way, way too attached to new acquaintances, and certainly took too much cold comfort in the calculated idea of letting these acquaintances go forever, and fade. You were social, adept at communicating, and understanding, really never alone at any point, despite your most ardent efforts to achieve a sort of ‘surrounded solitude’ that you coveted more feverishly than all of the marijuana and sleeping medication and empty female attention you could collect--more sins to keep track of, for whoever out there cares to keep count.

Before you realized it was like seriously, actually about to really happen, you often fantasized about your own death. Not so much the how (those questions came far less frequently as fantasy and quite more commonly as hourly anxiety), but the after, the wake--each ripple your disappearance would cause--those particular afters you rode each to the shore. From your obituary’s careful, factful phrasing to which lively photo of yourself the editors might select, to the tasteful, hand-crafted decorations adorning the service, to the sentimental wording of the program to who might arrive, and what they might wear. And each of the close-up, impassioned monologues everyone would surely cinematically eulogize you with (real heart-obliterating type daytime drama stuff) before cutting to more dramatic worm’s eye shots of gratuitous tears dripping from grimaced, pained faces and gazing, introspective bird’s eye shots of the untouched, serene grave site, cut--. You even dared fancy that a few strangers might find their way to the set gathering, purely by happenstance, extras, and, after thrifting through a laundry pile of secondhand articles detailing the stitches of your life’s story, would leave that morning donning the fashions you left behind, the threads of your existence, the costumes of your many personas; would leave then mourning the loss of a person they never even knew, and speak about you as if they had, all their lives. This is how you yourself often felt about strangers, the faces in passing cars. Meet-and-greets at 75 miles per hour; a modern sightseeing bizarre. Look!--just by the oncoming glimpse of a speeding driver’s expression in the opposite lane,--just by the flash quirks of their facial features--the momentary flicker of their eyes--in an instant, you build histories. Origins, growth--the passing face’s tiny triumphs and daily downfalls, all unnoticed--the loves, and the losses--passions and vice--their sacrifices and insecurities, sanctuaries and personal Hells. You peer into the passing face in a car on the opposite side of the highway, and what you see is your own. And some of those faces, some of them you just feel so fucking bad for--really without any discernible reason at all, aside from the way they just were--and then there comes this warm twinge, deep in the soft pit of your chest; a warm twinge, blooming, buried deep off in your heart’s cave, blooming to a sprout, branching through each artery, twisting through each capillary hot, fizzing free at each end, radiating, growing cool with each pulse, shrinking with each short breath, shrinking--. A mere instant the passing face is a piece of your life, and vwoom--a mere instant, gone. And so many thousands of times has it been you, the passing face in a car, at a street corner stop someplace in Jessup en route to Sunshine & Smiles daycare, or on the U.S. Highway 2 towards Cut Bank for a class B basketball game, or on the I-90 heading west towards Seattle on your final road trip, your final afternoon alive. And now that your own death has so unceremoniously, seriously, for really real, like, actually arrived--there is nothing remotely fantastical at all about the event, nothing to write about, nothing to speak of, not even in the slightest. A routine vehicular accident way way out in the wasted Montana mountain passes. A blurb in the Missoulian. Another anonymous white cross planted in the side of the road. After this whole trip to Missoula had come to a close, you were considering killing yourself--and now that Death has actually arrived, here, on Friday March 27, and not at all on your own terms--you feel cheated. You would feel cheated, that is, if you could feel anything in this moment, 2:48 p.m., twenty-one years of age, sitting in this doomed Crown Victoria next to Dane Alchevy and Kellan Clemons, childhood friends, eight seconds from being killed; anything apart from a reptilian freeze, a cowardly cold sludge in your veins and a dumb blank of your mind mum; you, lacking the ability to speak or make any noise at all.

And what great RELIEF you die with!

Not all at once, of course. Even in the mere micromoments preceding impact, you fight it. You want to die, yes; or, at least are vigorously considering death on a more utilitarian, self-serving scale of sorts, but--but not this way. Not today, March 27 2015, in this stupid outfit (beaters, Nike basketball shorts [sans briefs], star-spangled tank top), packed in this putzy grandmother-mobile with a trunk full of 5.0% by volume Trout Slayer, on this rather dull stretch of road, in this highly unromantic manner, with this terrible haircut, largely unaccomplished, unknown, and unlaid. But just as the front bumper comes into contact with the Jersey barrier at 68 miles per hour and the dashboard airbags deploy, you accept it. You breathe in death--and exhale soul-evaporating relief. Now all the stress about leaving college, about just how exactly you precisely plan on making capital M Money CAPITAL once you graduate is gone. Now all the worry about Matty struggling with the bottle/dope is gone, gone and you don’t have to make that phone call, and actually tell him out loud how you worry to death’s door and back about him, each day, every day, worry about him getting behind that wheel again and killing himself, and killing others, how you can point to his class president photo in the 2011 SHS yearbook, and how you can trace the changes in his face, another face passing by in a car on the freeway, and maybe even beat him in a game of one-on-one now, and tell him that at some point you do actually have to start reaching the potential others say they see in you, or cease moving forward altogether, and that it’s okay to ask for help, that he isn’t less of a man for needing any, that you yourself could use some help too, and that you haven’t forgotten, not for a minute forgotten, all those times the two of you shared together as boys, cutting their teeth on the frozen prairies of the Hi Line. Now you will never have to speak with your father about that trip to Pamplona, or how he wasn’t ever around, although you get why he wasn’t ever around and recognize his sacrifice, and how still you resent him for it, resent how you must be grateful for what he’s done financially for you, your mother, your sisters, regardless of your own inner personal feelings towards him, and how you resent the way you sometimes look at yourself in the mirror and see his face instead of your own, or how you both answer the phone in the same way, or that lasting image you have of him, alone, driving through a blizzard along some abandoned country road----all gone.

At 2:48 p.m. the Crown Victoria is suspended one hundred feet in the air. Below, the St. Regis River rushes and your graves await. Fifteen of the thirty canned beers you, Dane Alchevy, and Kellan Clemons collectively purchased in Missoula to avoid Washington State liquor tax laws have exploded in the trunk, soaking your belongings and raining down on the rocky soil at the cliff’s bottom. This will lead highway patrol officer Jayne Travis, who happens upon the scene at 3:06 p.m. on a routine patrol, eighteen minutes after you have expired, to initially believe the incident was caused by an intoxicated driver; though toxicology reports will later suggest it was only a case of distracted driving.