I remember a thud. Hitting the brakes. Spinning on the ice.
Now the airbag’s just a limp piece of fabric hanging from the steering wheel.
Something hisses. Maybe the radiator. A burnt smell lingers.
My face and wrists throb. I taste blood. My eyes sting. I open them, scrunch them shut. Breathe deeply. Try again.
Outside, snow still falls; wipers flap. In the rear-view mirror, a dark lump on the white street. A bag of trash blown by the wind.
There is a ticktickticking as the engine cools, like a clock marking the seconds.
I unbuckle my seatbelt, push on the hazard lights, and twist around to look out the rear window where snow is accumulating. A gust of wind rocks my car and snow slides across the shape in a thin layer. Like a fog. The flashers on my car blink red. On/off-on/off-on/off.
I fumble for my phone in the cupholder. I want to call Ron, hear his reassuring voice. But he’s in Hong Kong. Probably giving a lecture at this very moment. His phone off.
I call 911. I tell the woman on the line that I’ve been in an accident. She asks if I’m injured. I say no even as a trickle runs down the side of my face. She asks where I am. I have to get out to look.
The wind bites my face when I open the door. Needles of icy snow prick my hands. Where are my gloves? I’m an idiot for taking this shortcut on a night like this. Nothing but abandoned factories and warehouses here. I’ve never bothered to note the street names before. I walk away from my car, away from the lump, and find signs. I tell the woman the name of the intersection. She says she’ll send help; I should stay on the line.
A few steps behind me, my smashed car rests against a telephone pole. Just beyond that, the dark bag of trash moves. I want to believe, more than anything, that it’s the wind shifting it. But I can’t quite do it.
“I hit something,” I say to the woman. “Maybe someone.”
“You hit someone?” Her calm has ragged edges.
“Maybe.” My teeth chatter. “I’m afraid to look.”
“The ambulance and police are on the way. Don’t hang up. Go back to your car. Try to stay warm,” she says.
She’s asked me to do more than I can remember, and the phone is ice against my ear. I slide it into my pocket.
I can’t feel my toes in my boots. Steam rises from my car as I pace in the middle of the road, unsure which way I want to go. This is so unfair. I was driving along slowly, not texting or talking on the phone, the radio off, not taking any chances of any kind, and still I had an accident. I was paying attention. I was.
I turn to go back to my car, slip on the ice, try to keep upright but fall onto my knees, catching myself with achy hands. Tears well. I scream and close my eyes.
If only I could wake in my own bed, all of this just a nightmare. Slowly, I push myself up, slip, almost fall again, get my balance and make it to my car. I open the driver’s door and sit with my legs hanging out, snow falling in, hands in my pockets.
When I finally talk to Ron, tell him what’s happened, he’ll say the car doesn’t matter, we can get another. The important thing is I’m okay. He’s good like that. He might wonder where I was when the accident happened, meaning what I was thinking about, but he’ll never ask.
Ron’s always been someone who says we should live in the moment. Completely. Observe, interact, then write down memories later, maybe, but be in the here and now. Don’t take too many pictures or you’ll miss it, he says. I loved that about him when we first met. But after all these years I just find it annoying.
I shiver as the wind swirls snow around my neck and pull up my collar.
Ron was one of the last people I knew to get a smartphone, never on social media. But that’s part of my job. I post about upcoming library events, answer texts from staff and emails from patrons right away, wherever I am.
Ron and I’ve had arguments on date night over enjoying the moment – which is irony at its best, I suppose. He wants me to turn off my phone before we start, but someone might call from work. It’s a city library after all. But I suppose Ron has a point when he asks what could possibly happen that can’t wait two hours while we have dinner and talk, enjoy the food, savor the wine.
But not being in the moment is not my problem tonight. I was paying attention. I stand, brush the freezing snow off the driver’s seat, slam the door. I tromp toward the shape then stop, hold my breath. I think I see a hand, a gloved hand, small and dark against the snow.
I take baby steps forward and squint, visualizing something else. A twig poking through a plastic bag. A hanger. Please let it be something like that. Please don’t let it be a hand. Make this go away, and I’ll never take shortcuts again. I’ll pay better attention. I’ll live in the moment. Just please, please, don’t let this be a hand. A person. Someone.
I’m afraid to look more closely. Afraid not to. And then, I am looking down at the lump in the road. There is indeed a hand connected to a long, black puffy coat. The face under the hood is pale and wrinkled, with red lipstick on her lips. Even up close, she looks small.
Only moments ago, she was standing upright, moving forward with thoughts of being somewhere else, just like me. How did I not see her? I want to blame the color of her coat, the night, but she is so obvious against the white snow. My car is black too. How did she not see me? My headlights?
I kneel and reach out to touch her. At the last moment I pull back, sit down beside her, shove my hands into my pockets. The snow moves a chill up my spine. Now we’re two lumps in the road, together in this horrible moment that will define my life from now on. I’ll date everything in relation to this, just as I do with the pandemic. Oh, that happened after Covid but before I ran over…before I hit…before my car accident.
The puffy coat moves, and she moans, a breath of air through parted lips. I touch her arm, and she moans again. It sounds like, “Please.”
My breath leaves me in a gasp. My throat constricts and my chest heaves. Where’s the ambulance? Why don’t I hear it yet? Where are they?
And the police. The woman on the phone said they’re coming too. Will they question me? Of course, they will. It’s my fault. Hitting a pedestrian is always the driver’s fault.
I hear a siren now, faintly. It comes nearer then moves farther away as if the driver doesn’t know these streets any better than I do.
I take the woman’s hand in both of mine, and her fingers twitch. I can feel how cold she is through her glove.
“It’s going to be okay. There’s an ambulance coming.”
That’s when I remember the comforter in my car.
“I’ll be right back.”
She tries to speak, but I don’t wait.
I run to my car, slip, lose my balance, almost fall again. The rear passenger door won’t open, so I climb through the driver’s door to get to the back. Ron put comforters in both our cars because, he said, winters here can be brutal, and you never know when you might get snowbound in a blizzard. I didn’t thank him at the time, just gave him crap about not living in the moment. He took it good-naturedly, said being prepared made it easier to live in the moment.
I pause in the cocoon of my car. Every part of me wants to run away, pretend this never happened, but I struggle back out and slide towards the woman, the comforter in my arms. I cover her and sit beside her once more. She opens her eyes, looks at me, blinking.
I clutch my phone in my pocket, longing to call Ron again, but I let it go when the woman tries to sit up.
“Lie still,” I say, putting my hand on her shoulder. “Help is on the way. They’re almost here.”
“Don’t go,” she says, reaching out her hand to me, her eyes closed. “Here I am,” I say. I take her hand in both of mine again. “Here I am.”
Nancy Antle’s poems, stories, and books for children and young adults have been published by Cricket Media, Dial, Viking, and HarperCollins Australia. Since obtaining her MFA in 2014 from Southern CT State University, she’s concentrated mostly on her first love, writing short stories. These stories have been published in Drunk Monkeys, Noctua Review, Coe Review, and CT Review, among others. Since 2009, she has volunteered as an online creative writing mentor for Afghan writers who write in English, first with The Afghan Women’s Writing Project, then the Roya Mentorship Project, and now through her own website, AfghanVoices on Medium.