11.08.03 - THE AFTERDEATH

1.

Marty sat with his head against the strip of rubber that had been his tire. Through it the rim dug into his scalp: an itchy feeling, which made the gravel of broken glass in his shirt and on his lap that much more uncomfortable. The way his body lay out in front of him, he couldn't be sure whether his head was on crooked, or the rest of him. The stickiness in his hair finally poured over and he felt the trickle down his face. He resisted the urge to scratch afraid he might touch something he'd never been able to before. Besides, his hands were all hot, fat, and tingly.

Something crackled the dry grass at the side of the highway. Marty turned his head, at once thinking he shouldn't have. A human shape, bent over, peered from the gloom away from the lights of the road. Marty didn't like the way the stranger looked sideways at him - like a monkey stumbled onto something it had never seen before, a monkey cautious, but you just knew it was wondering how it should experiment with its new curiosity.

Maybe it's one of the people I swerved to miss, Marty thought. Stupid running across the highway like that. No wonder he's shy.

Marty's mind lapsed. He thought he'd blinked, but now the stranger's silhouette stood stooped in the same way, with the same unnerving sideways stare, but now facing the opposite way as before.

Where's the police? Marty kept thinking. They have to be here by now. Someone has to have called them. Where's the police?

"What's your name?"

Marty might have jumped at the stranger's garbled voice, if not for the sleepy calm that weighed his body and floated his mind.

"Mah-ee," Marty drooled, finding his tongue swollen.

The stranger cocked his head up, though his torso remain bent horizontal; the angle of the silhouette's neck reminded Marty of his own twisted body. A throb washed up through Marty, agonizing, caltrops in his lungs, now fuzzed into his temples.

"Maddy," the stranger's garble repeated. "I'm sorry, Maddy. I'll see you in the cemetery."

The man turned, departing with the same bizarre knees-lifted-high jog that Marty's headlights had spotlighted just before Marty had yanked on the wheel. A strange lanky ape shape, the stranger made, running back into its primordial twilight.

Were those red and blue lights breaking the fleeing stranger's shape like a strobe? All the freeway lights, yellow, white, red, blue, streamed together in Marty's eyes.

He thought he heard a siren.


comments? email me

______________________________________

| back | home |

all content ©2003 by Dave McCombs. Website created in Linux using Emacs.