Rush Hour

He sat in the now non-moving car in the rush-hour traffic looking at his watch knowing he would be late to work.  The woman in the car to the left of him was yelling at the person ahead of her, apparently thinking she would be heard through the panes of glass and over the radios and engines.  A baby was in her back seat wailing, but the woman didn’t seem to notice.  He looked around him at the never-ending rows of cars and angry people and thought aloud that the people resembled lemmings packed into shiny metal boxes.  A slight grin came to his face at this comment. 

Every day he made his way to work through the busy commute but he never complained.  Waking up at 4:30 AM for the ninety minute commute didn’t seem like a lot to complain about, especially since his company loved him and promoted him every chance they could get.  He loved his job, he would do it for free if he had to, but the six-figure salary they gave him was fine with him.  He donated much of his salary to charities, including his church and to local universities.  He was a good father and husband, as his family would attest.  He was not perfect by any means, but he tried hard to be as good as he could possibly be.  He turned up the radio in his car to drown out the constant sound of blaring horns on the highway.  He smiled as he thought how his boss would jokingly hassle him about being late.  He hoped the traffic wouldn’t be as bad on the way home from work so he could see his daughter in the school play.  He thought of how she was so adorable when she begged him to come before he had left for work.  Daydreaming about his daughter, he glanced to his left and saw the same woman as before turned around in her seat yelling at the baby in the back seat.  She was grabbing the baby by the arm and shaking him.  He couldn’t believe that people like that were parents. 

The traffic began to merge, and being the selfless person that he was, he let some cars enter ahead of him.  This angered the woman, who was now behind him, so much that she accelerated and whipped her car onto the shoulder of the road, trying to cut him off to get ahead of him.  As she pulled in front of him, she clipped the front of his car.  The back end of her car swung violently from the impact, tipped up on its two left wheels, and then flipped onto its side.  It slid for a hundred feet before flipping again and throwing the woman, who hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, through the windshield before rolling virtually unscathed onto the grass to the right of the highway.   He slammed on his brakes to avoid hitting the flipped car.  Panicking, he looked around but didn’t see the baby.  He ran out of his car and heard the screams of the baby coming from the overturned car.  Gas was leaking from the car, and the engine had caught fire, but he feared only for the baby.  He got to the car and saw that the baby was trapped under the back seat, seemingly untouched, wrapped in its white baby blanket.  He climbed through the broken windshield, stretching his arms to reach the crying baby under the seat, when he felt the baby’s arm reach out to him. He wrapped his hand around the baby’s body, and gently pulled him out from under the seat.  He felt a sense of relief as he freed the child, and when he looked into the baby’s teary pure blue eyes, he broke down and wept. 

The overwhelming sense of elation was replaced instantaneously with a sense of horror as the fire grew around him. The crowd of on-lookers who stood hundreds of feet back pleaded with him to get out of the car, but his shirt caught on a piece of twisted metal while trying to escape through the broken window.  Looking around for help, he saw the woman responsible for this tragedy through the scorching flames, and was stunned when he saw her piercing red gaze of pure hatred.  He couldn’t hear her words, but he felt her angry screams pierce his soul.  Feeling defeated, he tried to hand the baby to someone to take to safety, but no one would come near him.  The on-lookers remained frozen in place far back from the wreckage, unable to turn away but unwilling to help.  Screaming for someone to save the baby, the fire reached the gasoline tank.  His pleas were silenced as he and the baby died in a horrific, fiery explosion.  Within an hour, the debris and bodies had been removed, and the lemmings continued on in their shiny metal boxes.    

K. Abbey  2000, 2012

This was a short story I wrote way back in college back in Colorado, but I can relate to it more now since I have been living in Southern California for a while  (lots of traffic and asshole drivers!)    I did fix/update a few of the lines recently but kept most of it the same.  It is similar to the 9/11 story that I wrote in that it is written in the 3rd person.  Unlike that story, this ending is a little more depressing.  I was trying to use some color symbolism in this, and I also quoted some Police lyrics in this.. big surprise.    In the story we have good, evil, innocent, and the apathetic.  Unfortunately, good and innocent do not triumph in the end.  I also remember trying to have the contrast of the "evil" woman grabbing the baby by the arm and shaking it and the "good" main character grabbing the arm while trying to save the baby's life.  I was inspired originally to write this by seeing car accidents and people's natural reaction to stop and look.  Maybe it's just human nature.  What do we want to see?   Will we really help when we are put in that situation?   Or just remain apathetic, staying far back "unable to turn away but unwilling to help"?