Lifting | ONC 2024

I still dream about the night it happened. As if it weren't enough to have lived through it once, my mind makes me relive it, again and again and again. Brief flashes and fragments of memory dance behind my closed eyelids as I sleep, taunting me, haunting me.

The bright red light, the screech of brakes, the crash.

  At the time, everything seemed to happen so quickly, but in these nightly replays, it is slow, horrifyingly slow. It is too bright and too hazy, all at once, and every time it is exactly the same.

After the deafening clash of metal on metal, I am left with no sound but that of a quiet, tinny ringing. I am aching all over, and yet I am numb. The passenger door is caved inwards, and the window has gone, turned into shards of glass so tiny they could be glitter. Shiny, sharp, lethal glitter.

To my side, Becca is slumped forward. She isn't moving. I can't tell if she is even breathing. Her skin is crisscrossed with wounds from the shattered glass and there is blood coming out from one of her ears. I shake her, trying to rouse her, but it doesn't work. She will not wake up. Perhaps she will never wake up.

   I wish that I could wake up.

   People are coming, approaching the car. I can see them through the windscreen, even though it has so many cracks spiralling through it that it looks more like a spider's web than it does a windscreen. When I am pulled out from the wreckage, I don't register their voices or their words, nor the chill of the night air. What registers with me is the friction mark on the road, the metal crumpled as if it were no more than coloured paper, the traffic lights continuing to change as if nothing has happened. I become conscious of the pain in my head, radiating out from the point where the base of my skull meets my neck. I reach for that spot, and when I move my hand away, it is red.

   I'm not sure if I am bleeding or if I simply hadn't noticed the blood before. I don't know if the blood is my own or if it is Becca's. It is sticky, it smells sweet and coppery, and it is the same shade of vivid scarlet as the light that started it all and ended it all. A sense of nausea builds inside of me as I stare at it, at the blood on my palm, completely transfixed.

And that is when I finally wake up, my heart and head pounding, shivering in sheets that are damp with my own sweat.