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3:04 pm | 14 March 2003 | "the crash"

Ha! I get to go home early today so i am going to go shopping instead of writing some long, drawn-out thing about how love is in the grave or there's totally gonna be a crappy, pointless war or Americans are hollow and lonely bullshitters (please detect the irony in this statement). Here, have a story, everyone. Goodnight, i love you. clm.


Pieces of glass halo the woman�s head, glittering on the wet blacktop as the leafy arms of trees filter the streetlamp�s feeble light. A dog barks twice, distantly (the sounds ricochet off the horizon�s edge) and then stops. The sound of the crash remains in the air between them like shards of mirror hung in a garden to frighten away crows.

The girl stands twenty feet from the scene of the accident. The girl stands with her mouth as round as the moon. The girl does not move, stands dead still, but a breeze lazily lifts a ribbon of her red hair and turns it like a streamer at a steamer ship�s farewell.

The car still hisses; steam fingers through the grass. The turn signal is stuck. Tchk tchk. Tchk tchk, it says. The girl moves closer. She is not conscious of her feet moving across concrete, grassy median, concrete.

It is a very bluegreen night. It is still warm; an echo of the day�s heat wavers in the air. The girl�s cotton dress shifts in the night winds, blows back against her thighs as she passes the steam coming from the car. The car has bitten into one of the huge oak trees that stand sentry along the boulevard. The oak tree leans like a killdeer faking injury. Its roots claw unhappily upward from the ground. The smell of black earth is cold in the girl�s nostrils. She moves farther.

The woman is crumpled ten feet from the tree. The girl thinks of a car-struck bird she has once seen, wings backwards like a blown-out umbrella. The girl walks to the woman�s side.

The woman is laying mostly on her left side. The left arm stretches up, over the head, hand curled slightly. The right arm is brought up behind the woman�s back as though she is hiding a surprise. Her body is torqued at the waist like a fortune cookie, her legs jumble like an unbent paperclip, the woman lays like a woman laying like a tangled thing; like that. The woman is wearing a white blouse and a grey skirt, has a ring on her left hand, has a warm curl of blood in her seashell ear. The blood spreads out under her head, is soaking the dark hair spread over the pavement, making the hair look like melted plastic. Her eyes are mostly closed.

The girl kneels beside the woman, pulls the left arm down, uncrooks the right one. The right one is definitely broken. The girl ignores its loose chandelier-dangling. She lays them where they belong, on either side of the woman, and smoothes a smear of dirt from the woman�s ring-hand. The woman�s torso lays flat and the girl straightens the legs, too, pulls the woman�s skirt straight. There is a run in her stocking. There are a few bits of bark in her hair. The girl does her best to fix these things and finally sits back on her heels and picks up the woman�s hand, holding it in both of her own.

And this is how they are sitting when the ambulances arrive.


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unless otherwise noted, all work contained herein is � claudia sherman, 2002-04.
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