Black Lines

(Unfinished excercise)

Black Lines

"Where am I going?" I asked myself staring into a mirror--my rear view mirror glaring at me beneath the morning frost.

I played a novel while sitting in the drivers seat of my car, though the volume hardly excreted enough noise to give me any sense of where the main character stood. The words were but a deep grumbling playing though the highly tweeted subs across my back glass.

The smallest things can sometimes leave the largest impacts. Science leaves me stunned, and suffocating at times, though it tends to be contradictory. That's myself--contradictory--and when I stare upon myself in a broken mirror, I see distortion. The Universe, maybe this I see, a course of strings and electrical impulses so very similar to the human mind--even my mind, but as I stare closer into the mirror intending to see the atoms in the black of my eyes, I say to myself: "This is all in theory."

My vehicle seemed much louder in the cold settings of winter. The gear shifter popped into reverse, and that tiny squeaking that my tires gave off was enough to rise the hairs across my skin. Though if I turned the wheel as less as possible it didn't seem to bother me that much.

My empty house became unreachable by foot as I sped through the winding roads of the country. Driving fast was second nature to me--I'm still always quick to reach my destinations--because I loved to take my time once I reached them.

Ignoring my premonitions, I kept to the road. The end sat in my future just the same as everyone else's, but my ignoring of the bland surroundings told me that it'd be here sooner than most. My hands kept to the cold steering wheel--the metal would take time to heat up--and the curve ahead hardly seemed a top-heavy task for my low car.

And that novel continued to billow from the back of my car, a highly unorganized rumbling. I flicked the broken nob for a swap to the radio. Static disappointed me--I grumbled and threw back my head but for only a moment. The wire that ran beneath the mildewed carpet must have broke loose from the antennae forcing me to take one of two options: the novel I despised, or the static.

The static seemed to match my dead surroundings for the cold had nipped all signs of green. It complimented the dead, so I thought to myself, and I peered into the spider-web trees in the distance watching the sound waves dance within the gray limbs. It differed from how I imagined the numbing bass that often spoke melodies of ambient or techno music. The static consistently thrived as one giant. They say static is the only thing left over since the Big Bang--the dawn so something and maybe the rise of nothing at the same time. I turned my head to pop the stiffness in my neck, though it seemed to help very little.

So the universe was growing--'our' universe was growing, anyways. The possibilities of life elsewhere would often times place me in a daze, and if I thought about it while driving an accident became prominent. "It's all in theory," I said for a second time that morning. If only I had a voice recorder in my vehicle could I really understand the level of my madness. The times I talked to myself surely made no sense, and it was quite possible that I liked it that way.

That time was so distant.

Quite possibly hundreds of trillions of years ago I drifted in a hunk of metal across a secluded rock floating across nothingness.

The nothingness created my secluded world these hundreds of trillions of years later.

My last thoughts in the forsaken world haunt me in the next life....

I slowed on a curve atop a mountain, may it or may it not have truly been a mountain--geography was never my best subject. It skimmed the lip of a cliff, and if I might have guessed its height: ninety-eight feet. (One hundred pushed the limits, and ninety seemed too small, so ninety-eight would have to do.) I lived near the bottom of the valley in my parents old home, though it was empty and old, and also hidden...yes, thankfully hidden from view. A spring clipped near the far end with an eerie mist to cover its existence. Gray bubbles lay scattered beneath the dead forest, stones and rocks far larger than my home.

Even though I slowed, at the most, I only gazed for fifteen seconds at a time. It dawned on me the times I had passed this landscape, and with only fifteen seconds to take in my surroundings, I knew that I had crossed this road too many times.

Forty-two years passed since my birth. The year of then and now was unimportant.

I leaned to turn the radio off and listen to the squeak of my tires, and just as I passed the valley curve, a truck much higher off the cement that my own, sped around the next corner.

I held my last breath.

The front bumper of the 2059 Ford clipped my drivers mirror, and quickly destroyed the side of my vehicle. The thin metal and plastic shattered against one another's force. My rear panels sat wide, and before the truck could leave me unattended and struggling, his frame snagged with the panels above my rear tire. My vehicle fish tailed, the friction between my tires and the road squealing as I applied the breaks, my foot to the floor.

The elements followed the specks of broken glass. The road came across the windshield, sparks flashing as the hood scrapped against the asphalt. The seat belt sliced into my upper shoulder as the gravity pulled me--what I initially thought--was up.

I took but a glance out my door window. The world spun upside down, and hardly worried about the other vehicle, I caught sight of the railing that I had only shortly left behind me--the cliff that I once peered across. The railing was broken through, and dangling over the side. The driver of the other vehicle would surely not make it.



(To be continued...)

Reviews

[Joiedevivre]

I like the science spin on a mundane cardrive, interesting read, original.

[Lucifer Jones]

Interesting... I've read it 4 times and it makes me smile at it's odd-ness and it's, shall we say simple complexities. It's almost like reading mystery in the vein of Poe or Dostoevsky. Very intriguing read. Enjoyed it.

[Christoph Poe]

It's supposed to be a bit mysterious, I guess.

And that's my real last name. Lol. I'm not intending on following him, nor is he like a huge inspiration for me to base my writing upon. He's just a bit weird in my opinion. **shrugs**

But I've never heard of that other guy? I'm assuming he writes mystery as well?

Oh, and thanks for reading! I greatly appreciate it. :)

[Rachelle]

Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov
About the most depressing things a high school kid was forced to read but you get to appreciate his work later as you mature.....

[Lucifer Jones]

Didn't mean to imply a following... It's an atmosphere to your story... not an homage or a likeness in any other regard. I found your story very original in fact. It was a pleasure to read.

[Christoph Poe]

No problem! A lot of people think I try to be like him, (just because I enjoy writing), but I mostly write fantasy pieces which is rawly where this is heading. I think I might turn it into a small novel and see what I can do with it. **shrugs**

Anyways, thank you again!