Sorrows Over Summer
Chapters 1 - 4
Prelude to Light and Darkness
My left arm hangs out the window of a gloss black, 1980 Mercedes, as I take another drag of my Marlboro Red; red like Nikki’s pouting lips. I can’t stand it anymore. I can barely manage to open my own eyes in the morning, let alone deal with her bullshit. Prozac, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, whatever, they all sit with their tops off behind her bathroom mirror. Nikki shoots me a look, and I feel like plunging the hot cherry of my cigarette into one of her eye sockets. Six months ago it was all fun and fucking; now it seems like we’re living in “Requiem for a Dream.” I buy her flowers, chocolate, candy, fuzzy-fucking teddy bears, and she just rolls her eyes, says ‘Thanks’ and starts again with the frown. I guess the niceties take a backseat to the drugs.
“You want something,” I say, flicking some ash out the window.
No response. She turns her head towards the windshield. I take another drag and actually start to count the broken yellow lines on the road, waiting for them to turn solid. The wind keeps whipping the shoulder strap on my seat belt.
“You want me to put the radio on or something?” I ask.
I see her shrug in my peripheral vision, so I push the ON button next to the closed ashtray. The sun ducks behind another cloud, and I tap a small lever up a few times on the dashboard. My portable CD player’s still hooked up to the cassette deck, and I hit play. The solid line is broken, and then stretches back into solid lines. A blast of wind nearly pulls the car off the road, and Nikki’s right hand clenches the door handle until her knuckles are white.
“Watch where the fuck you’re going!” she says, lifting her left arm. “And put that butt out; you’re gonna make me puke.”
“You just sit tight, peach tree, I got this. I’m in control here,” I tell her, as calmly as I can.
“Oh really?” she replies, raising her eyes.
Apparently not calmly enough. I prepare myself for a verbal tirade, and am not disappointed.
“You got it under control, huh?” she begins. “Like last night, when you said you were in control, and you almost bounced us off a telephone pole, or maybe like the other day you said you’d come home with some dope, and you didn’t bring home shit. I swear to FUCK, Jeremy, if this guy’s not holding I’m gonna, I’m gonna, fucking kill you,” she screams over the radio. “You fucking hear me Jeremy? I’m going to KILL you. So stop asking me questions, and just fucking drive. Alright?”
Enough’s enough. I’ve listened to this bitch prattle on about getting stoned for far too long. It’s time to shut her up for a little while. Maybe a broken nose or a fractured skull will put a stop to her incessant whining.
“I’ll drive alright,” I say under my breath, “drive you straight to fucking hell.”
I wrench the steering wheel to the right as Nikki screams. Her hands press against the dashboard and slide towards the floor as she tries to find something to hold onto. My lips flinch just enough to smirk as the grill plows into the support beam of the Rt. 128 overpass.
A Strange Sense of Sirens
I feel strong hands behind my armpits, grasping, pulling, and tearing me from my seat. I scream, as my leg grates against the compacted steering wheel. I can only see out of one eye; the other is congealed in a transient shield of red. I am surrounded by a dark, wet solution, one sticky with shards of broken glass. I feel my body dragged out the side of the car, the window, or the door, I can’t tell, but I scream regardless as my limp leg whacks against the hard pavement. That quick noise brings the rest of the scene’s cacophony into focus. A series of sirens and crunching glass; the spray of water, and the honking of horns; the barking of orders, the wet slap of skin, and screaming.
I groan as the hands dragging me stop and another set wrap around my knees. The pain in my leg is unbearable, and I scream. The hands behind my legs drop off, causing my legs to crash back onto the pavement, and I’ve no breath left to ease the pain.
I try to sit up, but the arms behind me press my body back to the ground. They hold me there, and I feel a board pushed beneath my back and down towards my hips. As the board pops up, my body rattles until it’s strapped down. Now above the ground, I can survey the scene from a different angle. The entire front end of my car is unrecognizable from the interior. Through a haze of my own blood and intense trauma, I see the pylon that the car is smashed into. Right above it is an exploded smear of red and black. Red like Nikki’s lips… Red like the sirens whirling atop the ambulance I now occupy. Black like Nikki’s hair… Black like the inside of eyelids that register no input, just an unconscious nothing, shifting now, from black to white.
A Time of Peace / A Time of Terror
I stand outside, breathing just to disrupt the patterns of falling snow. Each flake drifts down with purpose, and with every breath I feel as if I’m foiling some dubious plan. It’s bewildering how the snow is so clear, but nothing else is visible. I can’t tell if the time is just after noon, or just before sundown.
I can’t feel the cold.
I can’t feel anything.
I try to lift my arm in order to pinch myself, but it feels like setting concrete and won’t move. I try to motion my eyes and look down towards my body, but am stopped with frosty resistance. I persist, and finally my eyes are set loose from their frozen state. Their movement pops and cracks in the otherwise silent air before clanging back and forth within their sockets. My mind looks up, but my eyes fail to follow. Their detachment leaves me without control over their motion. They are stuck, staring straight down at my naked body, white-gray and crusted with snow. I should be feeling the wet, melted flakes slither down my shoulders and chest, past my elbows and torso, towards my wrist and legs. I should bear witness to small puddles growing large beneath my feet and fingers. I should see puddles of wet heat rippling with each fall of peppering snow.
But I can’t.
All I can do is stand, wait. And stare. I know where I am, though. This is not the first time that I’ve arrived at this snow-blasted wasteland. As my mind reels through memories the snow stops pounding the ground and tapers into a soft flutter. A faint sound disrupts the air, quiet and friendly, much more so than the cracking ice behind my eyes. A gentle noise. A tender beep travels through my ears and off into the blank sky. The beep raises in tone and urgency as the white surroundings turn gray, darkening and deepening into an ethereal black mist.
I’m going home.
“Jeremy?” a woman’s voice calls in a soft, concerned tone. That same noise, a beep buzzing and blurry behind a veil of gentle words. “Jeremy Graves,” she repeats, “can you hear me?”
My eyelids lift for only a moment before piercing white light forces them shut. I groan and can feel my dry, cracked lips. My tongue is heavy and thick behind clenching teeth. All I can taste is copper and battery tips. Each inhalation feels forced and involuntary, more akin to a tight fist than a pocket of sweet air. I want to open my eyes. I want to believe that I’m at home, asleep, waking only to the harsh sunlight, but I know that’s not the case. Even the brightest summer day shouldn’t blind me like this, nor could any normal lack of heat betray all tactile feeling into numb loss.
I hear conversation, but it’s distant and lost. I grumble beneath the haze. No one seems to hear me. The far off voices draw closer. I try and force out some sense of speech, but a sharp press of air cuts it off before it reaches my lips, causing me to gurgle and cough. Not a word leaves my lips, only nonsense. I hear some kind of commotion, like distant gunfire, moving closer until it’s blasting and hissing in my ears. A hand presses against my brow. The warmth feels almost solar in strength. I try and reach for it with my head, but the hand presses back, hard.
I want to struggle. I kick my arms and punch my legs, and even that feels wrong.
Disconnected.
My head tosses back and forth, up and down, as if the bed is being shaken with uncanny violence. The movement stops without warning, and the once oppressive hand caresses my head, brushing stray hair from my face. The hand trails down my face, as if it was covered in rubber, or scales, but before I can decide it disappears beneath my chin. My head tilts back without my consent. A sharp prick in my neck and my mind screams, yet I cannot hear my own howl.
All that was black is white once again, and the snow passes by my face. Each flake falls in a pattern that my gasping breath creates.
Rude Awakening
“Alright son, that’ll be quite enough,” says a voice close to my right ear.
My eyes ease themselves open, but they don’t focus. The room’s ablaze with white light. I try to shield my straining eyes, but my hand won’t budge. I try to force my right arm up, but feel a strong hand grasp my arm.
“I said, that’ll be enough. Stop squirming; you’re strapped down,” says the same voice.
I tilt my head towards it, and see a middle aged man with spectacles and a white coat leaning over me. I can’t make out any other features before he releases his grip and stands up. I follow him with my eyes as he makes his way to the foot of the bed.
“You’re a lucky man, Jeremy. Very lucky,” he says. “How are you feeling, son? You’ve been out for quite a while.”
I’m too frightened to speak, so I just close my eyes and nod. What am I doing here? I try to reach back, but each memory is filled with snow, and cement— cement…
Nikki’s face flies through a windshield and straight at my brain, followed by a sweet rush of adrenaline; it replaces my fear and commands me to speak.
“Where’s Nikki?” My voice is loud in my head, but tiny to my ears. The sound you would expect from tin smashed with a sledgehammer.
“Just a sec, Jeremy,” the man replies. “Let me get the nurse, and I’ll answer any and all questions you have. That’ll give you some time to really wake up, maybe remember some things, and then we’ll talk.”
I know what he wants me to remember, and I don’t want to; I want to burn that piece of my brain into ash and scatter it into the abyss. My eyes still closed, I can see her lips, so red as they stretched wide in terror. Every crease beneath her eyes from the sleepless nights, searching for something she’d only found in the tap-tap-tap of a syringe. Her black hair, pulled tight against her head, screaming for someone to yank off her scalp and polish her skull—my eyes open again, and I have to know.
“Where’s Nikki?” I ask again.
The doctor’s lips curl in a nervous frown, and he turns to exit.
“Let me get the nurse, Jeremy, it’ll only be a moment,” he says, facing the door, leaving the room and me in silence.
My eyes adjust to the harsh light, and I’m encompassed in empty white walls. There are no windows here, no hum of birds or insects, just the quiet hush of machinery and squeaky wheels. I try to sit up, but I can’t. Just like before my eyes are open, my mind wills my body to move, but I’m held back. With clear eyes, I see buckles snapped around my wrists and straps across my chest. My right leg is suspended from the bed in a sling, surrounded by an immense white cast. What the fuck happened here? The cast I can figure out, but the straps and the buckles make me feel as if I’m a prisoner, not a patient.
I catch a glimpse of the door opening, and the doctor enters, followed by a young nurse. They walk towards the bed rigid and unsure.
“Jeremy,” the doctor says. “This is Linda. She’s been watching over you since the accident. You’ve been in and out for over a week. You’re lucky to be alive.”
Looking over at Linda, she sends me a shy smile, and I reflect it. I see her cheeks redden the slightest bit before she looks down and towards the doctor.
“You seemed to have a question before I left. Ask away and we’ll be more than happy to answer it,” the doctor says.
Fully awake, I can feel the blood in my arms stopping at the buckles, the straps weighing down my chest, not allowing me to fully breathe.
“Yeah, I got a question,” I say. “Can you loosen up these straps? My hands feel like balloons, and it’s a bit difficult to breathe.”
“Wait, what?” the doctor says, before shaking his head and chuckling. “The straps, right, right the straps. Linda, take those straps off him, would you.”
Linda takes a seat by my left thigh. She undoes the first buckle on that side. Her polished fingernails glide over the leather and beneath the metal buckle. She then undoes the strap across my chest, before leaning over to reach the last strap around my wrist. As she does so, the scent of her brings me back to the car. The scent of Reds and a splash of perfume filter into my memory before colliding into reality.
“Where’s Nikki?” I ask.
Linda sits back, and I’m free of the hospital shackles.
“I’m sorry, Jeremy, but she died in the accident,” Linda says, but I barely hear her. “She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, and well, there was nothing the paramedics could do. I’m so sorry.”
Dead? I know it’s possible, but the truth of it is entirely different from mere possibility. As I lie there, humming in the echo of her words, she drops her fingers over my hand. She squeezes once, quick and reassuring, before she rises from the bed.