True Love of Coffee

I know its not poetry. This is the prelude to a story I’m finally sitting down and writing. I spent about an hour on it tonight and wanted to get some feedback. It is the first story I’ve written in a long time. Any thoughts or commentary would be great.

Into the Looking Glass, Prelude****************************

It was four o’clock, five minutes into my commute home. The daily masses were driving through the endless corridors of concrete highway, trying to maintain a slim bit of sanity as they realized how moronic the person driving next to them was. I was fidgeting away, tapping my fingers to the beat of Aerosmith as I lost myself in thought and stared at the dull brake lights of the beamer in front of me.

Traffic was picking up as usual. You couldn’t expect more of an afternoon in Seattle at rush hour and to highlight my day it was the hottest day of the year. The dumb weather man on the television even said we were breaking a ten year heat wave record. That made me feel like an absolute winner. Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket too, or maybe a beautiful woman will blindly stumble into me tonight and ask me to have dinner. Yeah Jacob, this is the ‘good life’. Whatever that means.

I tapped the buttons on my radio. As always, my stupid i-pod had ran out of batteries ten seconds before I really needed it, forcing me to wander through the radio stations in hope of finding something that wouldn’t make me nauseous. I swear it seems like anyone with a stupid opinion gets a chance to have a talk show these days, even the poor shock jocks can’t even come up with something to startle me. I don’t know if that makes me an average joe, or if I’m simply that warped with city life to have witness most of what they are talking about.

Five miles in twenty minutes� Here I am in a performance coupe, with 300 plus horsepower under the hood and a whopping twenty-two miles to the gallon and for over half of my drive home I can’t even manage to get the car past ten miles an hour. Just yesterday that cute intern at work was telling me I had the perfect life. If she could only see me sitting here in a sweaty suit, listening to this unbearable banter on my stereo, and pondering if I have enough time to get out of my car and smack the driver tailgating me or not. Yep, perfect life Jacob. Perfect life.

I lost ten minutes more of my life looking at some beat up old truck with a broken set of tail lights and expired tabs as it crawled around in front of me like a dying animal. Another minute would have finally pushed me over the edge of sanity, but to my luck a sleek black convertible slid up beside me, behind the wheel was a fiery redhead who was simply stunning. I looked at her for a second, wondering why I couldn’t ever meet someone like her in my boring office life and as the thought crossed my mind, she smiled at me.

I don’t know what it was, but my gut instantly felt like someone jabbed me with a knife. I locked eyes with her for what seemed like a second as she yanked her wheel and forced her car to slam against the side of my coupe. I brought my eyes back to the road just in time to see my rearview mirror and the image of some monolithic truck slamming on it’s breaks.

All I remember after that was a lot of noise. Violent crashing, metal ripping itself apart, the clanging of bells, a few brief flashes of life, a sudden nightmare of thought, and pain, lots and lots of pain.

*

I don’t remember getting out of the car. I found myself face down against a pool of dirt, blood and oil. My head felt like someone had smacked it with a baseball bat and the screaming around me felt like shrill nails being driven into my spine. I opened my eyes as I pushed myself off the pavement, shocked by the sight of the red head laying face down just feet away from me. I crawled over to her and rolled her over; she wasn’t unconscious, she was dead. I wasn’t ready to see what had happened, her pretty face was covered in blood, and she didn’t die from the car wreck. No, the large bullet hole in her cheek was far more likely to have caused her sudden departure.

My stomach turned. I had seen gun shot wounds plenty of times before, but this time the blood was everywhere. It was on me, it was on her, and the surrounding scene looked like a battlefield littered with smashed cars. A few feet from us was a pistol with a dozen spent shell casings laying on the ground.

What the hell?

For a second my sanity broke just a little bit. My head was swirling and I couldn’t even comprehend what I was looking at. I knew there were other dead bodies laying around me, there were too many cars crumpled into piles of wreckage to have been a car crash. A few were on fire and dark pillars of smoke jetted up into the sky. A piece of metal scratched my face as a car exploded just yards away from me, throwing a wave of terror at my mind as the pulse knock me to the ground again.

“Jacob” I heard a man’s voice in my head. It sounded like someone was standing right behind me.

“I’ve done all I can for you. You need to run. Get out of there. Now!” The voice sounded panicked, like a parent warning a child of an oncoming car. I laughed, probably because I was in shock, or because the warning was just a little late.

“Run. Hide. Now!” The voice shouted in my head.

I don’t know why, but I was compelled to listen.

I picked myself up and managed a desperate run to the side of the freeway just as the sirens of police cars came into ear shot. I pulled over the railing and fell ten feet to the city street below, smashing to the ground in a feat of poor acrobatics as I twisted my ankle. No one was within sight. I hobbled down the street in a dazed panic, not knowing why I suddenly felt like a hunted quarry. Eventually I found a little cubby hole to fall into, which was good because I barely kept hold of consciousness for another thirty seconds before the whole world faded to black.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 26th, 2006 at 4:29 am and is filed under Creative Writing, The Looking Glass. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.