An Accident
We were coming up to where the roads cross, and I was looking out the window at the browning trees and undeveloped fields going by. There was a white van stood sitting in the middle of the junction. It looked like it couldn’t quite make it across the road, and had stopped to take a breath as the seconds that went by seemed to move slower. It seemed to pause, only for a moment, as time slowed to still, and when it moved, I saw you. A boy was lying in the middle of the road.
‘Oh my god. There’s a boy. There’s a boy lying on the ground. He’s not moving.’
Cars stood solitary surrounding him like an audience, their drivers looking on from outside their vehicles, one a car, another a bus, the other a van. Their mouths stretched in big round O’s aghast by the same masks they all seemed to be wearing. They stood spaced in a sterile circle, looking from the different junctions where their journeys had been interrupted, at a far and strange distance from the boy. He lay alone in his own blood where the road around him had been dyed dark red. And as I watched the cars drive around his body, and ours began to turn to do the same, it reminded me of how quickly life would move on without you in it.
Because now we’re home, and the television is going on, and everyone’s watching the weather report, and complaining about the dark grey pixelated clouds that will dictate the next three days. And Friends is on next, and hearing the studio audience laugh is too disgusting hanging heavy in the air, strained. It wasn’t long before phone calls were being made, and the ‘you’ll-never-guess what-happened-to-me’s’ were heard. You could hear through the phone their mouths in ‘O’s’, their eyes just as wide. It wasn’t long before you became a conversation piece.
And upon the discovery of news of your death that night, my mother’s comforts remind me of how yours will be up all this night. And my brain is wracked by her sobs as she is wrecked by the relentless self-interrogation as to why she ever allowed you that bike in the first place. It wasn’t difficult to discover. It was all over the news that night. And having heard it on the radio over the white noise of hissing pots and pans and the kettle whistling letting us know it was time for tea, your death was labelled a delay. The still of blue blinking lights flashing motionless in time was the late-night news report, and then discovering your name, Shane.
And now we’re arguing with the neighbours about the noise of their music, and they’re saying how ours is too loud when we both know it’s theirs that’s the problem. And there’s grumbling, and muttering and we both know how awkward it’s going to be next time we run into each other in the driveway, or at the bus stop, or perhaps as we find ourselves in a long line at the supermarket as we go about our fragile lives.
And the next day, the façade of brightly coloured balloons and flowers in their multitude lay witness in mounds to the crowds at the crossroads. Some people stood, some prayed, some younger ones cartwheeled round the sign posts at the grey junction that had been sprayed with pinks and reds and floating purples and blues. I wonder how soon it will take to forget. And how in the following weeks the teddy bears turned to mush, and the flowers to mulch, the crowds went from some of those first few, to one, to none. And reading your endless virtual condolences remind me how soon people will have to scroll through to see you. Your last photo will age, and your page, lie dormant. Now adorned with angel wings and heart emojis I wonder how quickly it will take to forget.
‘We have to do something,’ says a small, hollow voice, unrecognisable as my own. It bounces off the windshield sounding hollow as if echoing through a great cathedral. Small panicked notes rise to desperation as I realise what’s happening; we’re driving away.
‘We have to go back,’ and I begin to clamber over my head rest, wrestling with my seatbelt which doesn’t want me to turn to look at you, but I do. And in that second, I saw you lying there.
Flung in the middle of the road, your small skinny body lies on its back, your delicate limbs spread far from each other. A face sprayed with freckles, your head sprigged with red curly tufts, has been dipped in the maroon halo you lie in. The shiny plastic shards of your shattered helmet lie about you like broken glass and glow different colours in the slowly sinking sun; red, amber, yellow.
I watch where you lie lonely as the seconds stretch to fit the colossal time it takes to drive away from your body. The space around you is so vast. And as we begin to pass you by, I watch. Why was no one going over to you?
‘Why isn’t anyone helping him?’
A crimson tear dribbled down the side of your face. I watched as you lay there, in the space where the roads cross, arms outstretched, like a God. And then, we drove away.
Sandra Black lives in Dublin, Ireland. She graduated with a degree in English Literature and History and holds an MA in Creative Writing from Dublin City University. She works as a writer for Hot Press Music Magazine.