Accident Chapter 1

Chapter 1

    SMASH!!! BAM!!!!
    SCREECH!!!
    The cars hit. Crashing into each other they came to a sudden halt. Metal bits intertwined with fabric felt onto the street. The apolstry caught on fire from the heat of the metal. And the pedestrians were terrified.
    Three seconds was all that it took for that peaceful day to be ruined. It was all over by then. The damage had been done.
    A doctor having lunch in the restaurant near by rushed to the accident to see if there were any survivors. To paramedics who were driving by in their ambulance pulled off to the side of the road behind the blue car involved. Traffic stopped each way with people crowding around from all over, out of office buildings, out of restaurants, out of their lives to see what was happening.
    The doctor felt the pulse of the girl in the blue car. Eagerly awaiting for the thumping of blood to her brain, he held his fingers there calling for some sign. But there was no response. The girl was dead.  People began to weep, while watching him pull her eyelids down over her lifeless eyes.
    Her father was the driver and the paramedics were on the other side tending to him. His heart rate was slow but still beating, fighting to stay alive. He must have been only forty-eight years old. He was not responsive to their questions nor was he able to see what happened to his daughter. The paramedics attached a neck brace to him to keep his brittle neck from cracking. They started an I.V. to replenish his lost fluids. He was bruised and cut with broken bones.
    The driver in the other car, the red car, was conscious but in very bad shape. He had people who were the flower shop across the way helping him. He felt as if his leg was broken. He had a cut on his forehead, and the people who were helping him gave him ice to put on it.
    Word had gotten around that the daughter in the blue car had been killed. A tall, elegantly dressed man walked out of the flower store with two long-stemmed red roses and placed them on the next to the lifeless body of the daughter. The father, seeing this man, seeing what he was carrying was over-whelmed. A single tear from his eye collected and fell down his check. He died there a few moments after.

    The police arrived about fifteen minutes after that followed by another ambulance. The girl’s body was already loading into a black body bag and was being carried into the first ambulance. The doctor and the other paramedics had gone the check out the driver in the red car. He passed out from the pain of his leg, but he was stable enough to be moved out. The paramedics loaded him up into the second ambulance and drove swiftly to the hospital.
    Another police car arrived as the father’s body was being loaded up into the ambulance alongside his daughter.
    The officers were investigating the accident and questioning witnesses. The officers from the second car were searching the wallet of the father and the purse of the daughter. Soon, a call was place to my cell phone telling me that my father and sister had been killed in a car accident.

    I arrived at the scene as soon as I could. Seeing the two clumps of twisted metal  intertwined, inverted, I was speechless. Words could not describe my feeling. It was somewhere between terror and grief. But it wasn’t grief. I don’t know.
    The ambulance carrying my father and sister hadn’t left yet. One of the officers asked if I would like to view the bodies before they were sent to the hospital. I told him that it wasn’t necessary that I’d just see them at the hospital. I told him that I couldn’t bare the sight of something so traumatic, and that I was still in shock. He understood. It was a lie though. I just couldn’t see them.
    The doctor who was helping the other man came over to me.
    “Are you alright, son?” He said to me in a calming voice.
    “Yea,” I murrmered, “I’ll be alright.”
    He put his hand on my shoulder and told me that if I needed to talk to him about the accident or anything to just give him a call. He handed me his card. I took it from him and smiled.
    The ambulance pulled away carrying my father and sister’s body, when the other officer came over to me and told me that based on the alignment of the cars on the road and the direction and character of the impact, it was probably my father’s fault. My father is dead, my sister is dead, and it was his fault. They were the reason for this accident. And I still wasn’t able to cry or grieve or anything. Not when I saw the scene, not when the ambulance pulled away, not even when I learned that it was his fault. I couldn’t blame anyone but him.
    
    Sympathy letters began arriving in the mail. Cards with glitter, gold and silver, all over the front and Halmark written on the back flooded my mail box for the next few days. A card from the doctor who determined my father was dead and one from the two officers who were called onto the accident. I wondered why the officers sent one. For them, arriving at the scene of an accident is simply part of their job. My father and sister’s deaths were just another day at work for them. The doctor sent one because he was a hero, because he had gone above and beyond his ordinary duties of wearing a white coat and ordering someone else to administer drugs all on a little post-it note.
    My aunt Beth sent a card as did my uncle bill. They each sent separate ones because one had to try and out do the other. Both were like the ramblings of some Rococo artist, heavily ornamented with a whole lot of fluff. But no depth in either of them.
    Friends and others sent cards and flowers to me. My apartment was adorned with all sort of colors and fragrances. The requiem of my father and sister all played out in a flash of colors from all the cards. It was always funny how the requiem, the benediction of someone’s life, the musical farewell was never experienced by the person who died. It was never really for their benefit but for those who were grieving their deaths.
    Every card and every flower that I got all had the message with it saying that they knew what I was going through, that they understood. But how could they. How could anyone understand what I was going threw. I still wasn’t able to cry. I wasn’t able to grieve or feel anything at all about what happened to them.

    My friend Andrea came to visit me the night after the accident. She knocked quietly on the door, and when I opened it, she threw herself into my arms and said in almost a whisper, “Everything will turn out okay.”
    She pulled her mouth away from my ear and nodded her head up and down slightly. I could see tears in her eyes and on her cheeks as if she had been crying for some time.
    “I know it will,” I said and smiled at her.
    She smiled back and she pulled herself away from me. We went and sat on the couch in the living room. I was silent waiting for her to say something. We just looked out the window into the sky. The stars dancing around like a kaleidoscope spinning in the heavens were more than enough to hold on to the silence between us.
    Finally she turned to me and said, “When is the funeral going to be?”
    “I’m not sure exactly. My aunt wrote in her sympathy card that she was going to be here tomorrow if she could get a flight. We’ll probably go tomorrow and make arrangements.”
    “Oh…and do you know where you’re going to hold it at.”
    “I have no idea.”
    “Oh…”
    “It means a lot that you’re here with me,” I said and put my hand on hers.
    Andrea smiled.
    “I glad that I have a friend like you,” and I reached over to hug her. We embraced and she got up and left. I sat there looking into the stars, that blanket of night holding me in solitude. I was alone there. And I still, even then couldn’t grieve.

    Just as she said in her note, my aunt Beth came the next day with about seven or so suitcases of luggage and my uncle Bill to carry them. The first thing that Beth noticed was that her sympathy card was not in the center of my mantel. Instead it was my uncle Bill whose card was, as she perceived it, special enough to receive such a place of honor. And the complaining began.
    I never knew the rules, or at least never fully understood them, for determining a place of honor in one’s home. The places of dishonor were obvious, like the garbage can and the fire place. But places of honor were trickier. The coffee table, in the center of it all, was not for honor but for books and candles and things of that nature. The top of a TV could be if it was the focal point of a room, and on a bookshelf if it was visible to all and on the highest level. The mantle, I guessed, was the epidimy of accomplishment. I figured, based on the degree and furor of her complaints, that people displayed things as important as birth certificates and doctorates. I guess it never occurred to her that if the mantle suddenly collapsed that the doctorate would end up in the fire place and that her sympathy card would go from a place of honor to a place of dishonor in a flash. It would be the greeting card equivalent to having a monarch abdicate.
    “Have you made arrangements for your father and sister, yet?” She asked.
    “Not as of yet. I was waiting for you to get here so that you and uncle Bill could help with the funeral arrangements,” I replied.
    “Well you know, this should have already been taken care of. You’re just exactly like your father, always putting things off ‘til the last minute.”
    “Well I was trying to wait for you.”
    “Alright, today we’ll go. You need to take care of this.”
    “Sure thing.”
    You could never have any sort of conversation with the members of my family. It was always either an argument, and not the kind that actually follow logic, or some sort of attack.

    I arrived at the funeral parlor with my aunt and uncle later that afternoon as would be expected. It was quaintly named Jones’s Funeral Parlor, and it sounded as if the names “Discount Appliances and Air Conditioning Repair” belong at the end of it. Once I got inside, I was not discouraged from this observation. It was cheeply decorated with vine colored carpet and deep gold curtains. The man who we spoke with never actually told me his name, only my aunt. But he did say that the funeral would cost around $7000 given that we chose one of the caskets that came with the package. Imagine, your life all summed up into a nice neat little funeral package.
    We were taken into the room with all the different styles of coffens lined up on the walls. This was the equivalent of purchasing a car for the afterlife. This decision was obviously then a very crucial one since the vehicle would have to last you for all eternity. The aluminum casket would cave in after 50 years, while the titanium alloy casket could last up to 90 years. After looking through them all, the caskets all looked plain. They all looked the same. One was just the same as the other. It like how my father wanted thing, to have everyone be just the same as him. Finally, in death would he achieve the peace he always wanted. It was just all so boring.
    My aunt selected one that we all could agree on, and it was time to choose embalming plans. Cremation, et al. I had to think it over. My father wasn’t a political figure, he wasn’t a Nobel prize winner, he wasn’t someone that anyone would really miss outside our family, so we didn’t really need the 90 Year Lenin preservation special, nor did we need the, I don’t know, 5,000 year Ramses II mummification. My uncle suggested that we just go with the basic package of normal embalming.
    This whole process was repeated for my sister. Her casket and her embalming were the same as my father. They could go hand and hand to oblivion in matching caskets.
    “Well everything seems sufficient,” Beth said as we were walking out to the parking lot.
    “Yea, it should be a really nice ceremony,” I said.
    “Have you thought about what you’re going to say?” Bill asked me.
    “In truth, I don’t think that I’ll be able to do it.”
    “Oh honey, I’ll give the eulogy for you if you want,” Beth said. She was eager it seemed as she kept talking. It was as if she had a list of things she need to get off her chest about her brother.
    “Sure, Beth. Anything you want. I appreciate you doing this for me,” I said.
    That night, my aunt and uncle left for their hotel so that Beth could write down her speech. I could imagine her for the next three days making outlines, writing drafts, revising them. Lots of crumpled up pieces of paper in the trash can ballooning over the top of the rim. My uncle getting frustrated with everything.
    The next three days for me were uneventful.

    The funeral was held in a small chapel inside the funeral home. Jones’s Funeral Parlor’s own in house reverend presided over the ceremony. The rosary was given. Our family pretended to be catholic, of course no one was able to tell that a reverend and not a priest was presiding over the ceremony. That’s how devout they were.
    I never knew that there were so many shades of black. All the women in our family, aunts, cousins, sisters-in-laws, people exponentially removed, in different colors and all were black. Of course they would all call them different colors. Midnight, crow, nightingale, all meant black in some form or another.
The men in my family seemed to act just like my father. It was as if forty years ago, they all made a pack to be the same judgmental, unmoving, unfeeling individual who hated everything. This was probably a shield of armor that they all erected to protect themselves from the women in their lives and all those different shades of black.  
    Both the caskets sat there in the front of the chapel, modest and plain. Their bodies were so torn and disfigured by the accident that the embalmers figured that it would be best for us to have a closed casket ceremony. Comments were dispersed among the attended as to how severe the accident really was. Some figured that Elliot, my father, didn’t see the on coming car swerve into his lane and kept going hitting the guy. Others figured that he wasn’t paying attention to the road and that’s what it got him. Two front seat tickets at his own funeral. Whatever the reason was for the closed casket, it was someone who had to be blamed for something. I was blamed for not picking up my father and sister from the air port when he came in. If I hadn’t been so selfish and picked him up, he still would have been here. Of course the fact that I didn’t know that he was coming was immaterial.
    My aunt stood up after the reverend’s service and gave her speech. Her eulogy was just like any other eulogy. Elliot was a great guy. He was a perfect father, a wonderful husband to both of the wives he had in his life, and an honorable man. There was nothing unique about his life that made his eulogy stand out. I hated to hear that. Why was it that his life never stood out? Maybe that’s why I couldn’t grieve. I couldn’t cry over him or my sister. My sister’s eulogy was not really her own. It was like a footnote in his text. Her memory was even more thin than my father’s. At least my father got his own eulogy, but she simply got, “And he died a brave death with his daughter, April.” Nothing about April, my sister.  Just that she was there when my father died. Maybe it was because Beth didn’t know anything about her nice, and had no real interest for that matter.

The wake last night was more so about my living relatives catching up on old gossip than about remembering those dead. Comparing outfits along with illnesses, they were all sharing complaints and judgments over a mediocre selection of finger sandwiches and cake. Humbly, they all made their expected sad faces and mourning smiles as they approached the casket seeing me standing there by it. The men would shake my hand and nod their heads while the older women would reach up and hug me.
   When most of the guests who were expected came, I left the front and went to go mingle amongst the gossip. People would ask such questions as “How are you feeling?” and “Have you been doing well?”These questions are the sort of things that would seem obvious to them. But my answers were far from obvious. I didn’t know how I felt. I didn’t feel anything that I knew they would think I should. I wasn’t happy, and I wasn’t sad. I was blank.
    Then questions would arise of a more social nature. A distant cousin of mine came over and asked, “How is your career going?”
    “Good,” I said vaguely.
    “What sort of work do you do again?”
    I could never remember what I was supposed to be around those people. I thing I was an accountant or stock broker. Something in the business field, I remembered that. My father never approved of my true career nor would any of my family. He told them that I was something important, which translated to someone that made a lot of money but had no passion. So, I pretended to be something I wasn’t to avoid the forth coming confrontation.
    “I’m in creative advertising,” I said.
“Really, what is all involved with that?”
“I think up creative ways to make advertising.”
“So you think up ways to get people to spend their money?”
On useless crap, I thought to myself. “Yea, well that’s what I try to do.”
“Very interesting. So you must be pretty creative, huh?”
Getting people to spend money doesn’t take that much creativity. It’s been around for so long now, people just give away money. All that’s really needed is a sign. That’s how homeless people get others to give them money, they make a sign. Signs are all over the place, so that’s not really unique or distinguishing or creative. But I had to be really careful about how I responded. If I did agreed, there would be an argument, but if I agreed, I would be egotistical. If I was sarcastic, it would be taken as an insult. No matter how I responded, it was going to be right. So I’ll just say “Thank you,” and see how that goes.
“Thanks for saying that.”
“Well you know I’m pretty creative myself,” she said with the kind of smile that says she is both bragging and saying “f**k you” at the same time.
“Really?” I said halfway interested.
“Yea, I’ve been writing a book.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about this girl who was unable to find true love in her life.”
It probably wasn’t pretty good given that it was written by someone who thinks that being in advertising is creative.
“What’s the title?”
“I haven’t found one that would be fitting.”
“Well, I’m sure the more you write, the better it will be and the easier as title will come to you.”

The night after the funeral Andrea came over again. She was still feeling bad for me, but I didn’t feel like talking about this. All this talking about death was depressing, and I just wanted to get back to living my life. I wanted to live without the shadow of my father bathing over me. To people that I was never really close to, who never really understood me, are dead and I just wanted to forget about them.    I told Andrea this. She smiled at me, and it was a smile that didn’t say “f**k you,” and told me that she was there is I ever wanted to talk about it. We just sat there in silence.

Reviews

[lAcEy_LoO's Poems Site]

LOVED IT.... it was interesting... but good keep it up!!!!

[C.m.v]

At the beginning this had the feel of a script, or a screenwriting....it felt more like it was being written as a movie...then you threw in the fact that the "narrator" was the brother and son. That was clever, and I really didnt know where the story was going, so it kept me reading. I like the descriptions and how you went through a variety of things that needed to be done...the remark about the casket being like a car...interesting. You had alot of comparisons in this that I found clever. I like this, and I want to read more!
Here's the thing though. I have no idea what the story is truly about--or where its going. I assume its going to be about a man going through grief? Also, what is his career? For real? Why should he be ashamed of it?
The family descriptions seemed real..I like the whole cards and honor/mantle reference. You asdded amusement in a story where I didnt think I'd find any, considering the plot.
I did like the main character. He was very mysterious and un-feeling though. I'd like to see something from him to where I could relate....is he holding in emotions because he is a cold person? Or because he has been hurt so much, he no longer feels anything? why was there such a distance between him and his sister? (See, you can tell you did a good job, because I, as the reader, want to know more!)
I also liked: (The men in my family seemed to act just like my father. It was as if forty years ago, they all made a pack to be the same judgmental, unmoving, unfeeling individual who hated everything. This was probably a shield of armor that they all erected to protect themselves from the women in their lives and all those different shades of black.)

I see a ton of potential for a great story and a great character, so yes, I would definitely like to read on! Just give us more info about the main character!
Overall, this was great! I look forward to reading more..please let me know when you post it!

[Donald Meikle]

It will pass spell check. Some words are wrong, either reread or have it edited. I would rewrite it now that it's
completed this far. The first paragraph, (Where hooks are dangled) is choppy and should flow. Small sentences are great and add to action, but should be clear and easy to read. (I cheat and read mine aloud). There's a good story going here. I like the hook on who was at fault. The character build up is well done.
Yes I would like to read more

[Chase Baldwin]

Good set up. I think you did a good job establishing the family and their general attitude toward each other, even though half the characters in the family are dead. The little bits about Andrea are small enough to want the reader to know more about her and narrator's relationship, so naturally you withhold it until further installments. Kick off Chapter 2 with some good stuff and I think we've got a good thing going here. Good work, dude.