"Closer Than They Appear" by Cary Rainey
In the blink of an eye, the world goes into a high-speed spin and I can see Danny coming out of the convenience store and he’s young and he’s beautiful and I would never hurt him, never, never, never, I could never be angry with him and I shouldn’t be because he hasn’t done anything so wrong. He was just mixed up. He was just confused and what did I do? I nailed him to the wall. I threw him in a cell and I threw away the key. Melanie wasn’t the solution to anything; she was the problem. This, I think, was what I was so close to seeing a second ago. My Danny didn’t need a baby girl, I think as I let my foot slide off the brake pedal.
That moment, that break suckers like me aren’t supposed to get but always seem to get anyway, isn’t coming. I’m flying across the third lane now, crossing into the fourth, and the concrete divider is Garfunkel and everything is Garfunkel and it’s coming toward me with the speed of a hurricane and I close my eyes and I scream.
***** ******
Quiet.
Nothing moves and nothing makes a sound. The world has stopped moving and I can see, maybe for the first time in my whole life, with perfect clarity. It’s over. Whatever there was here, it’s over. The plants have all died and the waters have all turned to ice and the flat grey dime in the sky is the only light in the universe, but it’s a dead light for a dead world because we’ve all lost our minds and the sun is about to explode. I’m still in the car with my back pressed tightly against the seat. The car too is pressed tightly, only this against the concrete divider, the length of the passenger’s side one with the divider. A car is frozen in time on the other side of the concrete divider and the snowflakes in the air have ceased their falls. In the blink of an eye, it all came to a stop. I’m sitting in the car and I can feel that the engine is still alive. I’m looking at the gauges on the dashboard and although I can make no sense of what I’m seeing, I get the feeling that everything is alright.
Everything is perfect. I’m going to drive away from this and everything is going to be perfect. Here I come, Danny, darling.
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