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"?
