Saturday, February 17, 2018

Adam's Last Drive

Adam mopped more of the tears from his face with the heel of his free hand, managing to keep enough focus off his loss to stay on the road, but only just barely. Despite his bleary vision and bloodshot gaze, flecks of light flashed across his eyes that were not reflections of the streetlights passing by him as he drove. The dash instruments of his decrepit Datsun went out.

His body shook terribly with each sob and he turned his face upward as if to beg some deity for lenience or reprieve. His mouth gaped with such agony that his lips pulled tight over his teeth and when any sound did mange to emerge, his cry sounded like a frightened animal.  All the while,  his eyes flashed as though they reflected a distant fireworks display unseen in the night's somber sky.

The blown speaker in the right passenger door buzzed loudly before it made a loud pop and the battery on his flip phone sparked and hissed and oozed ominously. The lights on his eyes swirled like deep sea, luminescent shrimp escaping a predator.

Fragments of language travelled across his mind's surface. "Mark, why!" "Please?" "How?" "But... We!" "You...I...no!" And incomplete and incoherent as they were, even if the unfinished thoughts never reached his voice, those eyes shone, and flickered, and danced, and the world around them quivered, too.

A stoplight blinked from red to black as he sat unnoticing at it, until a car pulled around him, stopped, then went through the darkened intersection. He pulled into motion again and when his old truck listed too far right before correcting, a street lamp it passed under grew suddenly brighter, then exploded, showering glass onto the shadowed sidewalk.

Apartment buildings along Adam's slow and unsteady path flickered or went dark, an approaching Pruis went quiet and crawled to a stop before it could even pass him. A transformer on a street corner exploded gloriously, showering sparks into the blackness that could only briefly rival those that seemed to play across his vision.

He did not notice. He was no longer accelerating and the old beater drifted slowly toward the sidewalk, gently resting against a dull, mauve Taurus. A pop and hiss could be immediately heard under the hood of the sedan next to him, and then three loud bangs fired the pistons from Adam's engine clear through the truck's hood and as near to the stars as they could climb, leaving perfect little exit holes in the warm metal.

Save for the sounds of his crying, the evening became utterly silent. The flashes of brilliance playing across the surface of his eyes exploded into a galaxy of supernovas that were now visible even through Adam's closed lids. He held his head and moaned Mark's name like a futile prayer, and his gas tank exploded.

Three days later, Mark arrived at Adam's service late enough not to face the other people who'd loved the man. Mark's new lover was not at his side.

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