The 1962 Buick Invicta barreled across West Cliff Road under a pregnant Indiana night sky; the low, looming storm clouds, the passing sycamore, pin oak and the smooth asphalt all just various shapes and shades of black. Half a foot of nightgown, trapped between the hastily closed drivers side door and the green mist frame, flapped violently in the electrically charged air. Cloud-to-cloud lightning traced brilliant arcs and forks miles across the firmament as solid double yellow lines slowly snaked across the road ahead of the careening station wagon and its faint headlight beams.
The woman in the drivers seat was hunched over the steering wheel, periodically wiping away the collecting moisture from the windshield. The cab light was on directly over her head, giving her alabaster skin, light brown hair, and white gown an unearthly glow in the otherwise overwhelming darkness. She was no more than twenty five, with a complexion that evoked a pristine childhood of Sunday school, finger sandwiches, and hours perched on a perfect fathers shoulders chasing fireflies.
She coughed and a fine mist of red splattered against the windshield and its streaks of persistent fog producing an instant Pollock. A drip of blood crawled from the corner of her lips to her cheek. She drew her left hand across her mouth and considered the crimson stain on her palm. A sudden red glow filled the air on the other side of the windshield: brake lights.
The woman in the nightgown swerved the Buick into the opposite lane, across the double-yellow snake, and darted past the parked sedan. The antlers and mottled brown hair of a herd of deer were immediately illuminated. The mob of deer leapt across the two lane county road, diving into the tree line on the right; all clearing the station wagons path save one: a fawn, frozen; its eyes staring directly into her own.
The woman quickly yanked the steering wheel to the right, narrowly missing the young deer. She whipped the car back to the left but the station wagon fishtailed and the right rear tire slipped off the road and into a shallow ditch. The momentum carried the back half of the car completely off the asphalt. She tried to correct by pulling the wheel hard to the right, but the vehicle spun one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction, slipped off the pavement, completely into the ditch, finally coming to a stop at a steep angle, and facing back to where the deer had forced her to swerve. She found the headlights trained on the lonely fawn which hadnt moved at all.
The woman in the nightgown twisted at the key in the ignition, producing the staccato notes of a baying basset hound, but the engine wouldnt turn over. The headlights flicked on and off as the starter wheezed in its effort to spark the engine into life. The strobing light seemed to pull the young deer from its trance. It darted to the right, over the shallow ditch and into the dark forest. The other car crawled forward, slowly easing up next to the station wagon, but did not stop. The dark cab of the sedan revealed nothing about the intentions of its driver. The woman in the nightgown waved her arms towards the passing vehicle, but the car picked up speed and left her behind, turning into a fading pair of tiny red lights. She leaned on the horn in anger and disbelief.
Only a few seconds passed before another set of headlights approached. The woman leaned on the horn, pressing more frequently, creating a crude impression of Morse code. The passengers side headlamp of the approaching car was aimed low and to the right, like a lazy eye, and cast a useless spotlight immediately in front of the fender. The womans eyes grew wide in panicked recognition and she stopped honking. She fumbled with the lever to the side of the steering wheel until the headlights switched off, only to quickly realize that the cab light was still on. She furiously stabbed at the switch above her head and the car was plunged into pitch darkness. The woman in the nightgown pushed herself lower into the seat and a sudden stab of pain shot up from her abdomen and threatened to erupt from her mouth like a volcanic scream. She threw a hand over her mouth to suppress a wail.
A beat-up Ford F-150 blew by, the rattling of its loose headlamp somehow still audible over the chain smokers cough coming from the overworked V8 engine. The sounds of the truck subsided and left the womans patch of road a void of light and noise, like the bottom of a deep abyss. A gently rising wind rustled the limbs of surrounding trees, like a soft and aristocratic applause, inviting the symphony of hidden crickets and frogs to begin warming up for the evenings concert.
The woman in the station wagon tried turning the engine over several more times, to no avail. She threw open the drivers side door. It complained with a loud, rusty creak before coming to a premature stop, having dug itself into the moist earth just at the foot of the forest. She emerged from the uncomfortably narrow opening with her left hand supporting an enormous belly while her right hand steadied herself against the station wagon door. She grimaced as another wave of pain shot through her very core. The sound of a swiftly moving river pervaded every cubic inch of the surrounding air, filling the spaces between every limb and every leaf. The bank of the Wabash River was directly behind her, maybe fifty feet from the other edge of the road. She looked in the opposite direction, dipping her line of sight beneath and between branches as she scanned the entire landscape.
There it was! The red, illuminated sign of Logansport State Hospital. She could just make out a corner of the sign, but it was so familiar, like a childs familiarity with the features of a favorite stuffed animal, that even a molecule of it betrayed the entire specimen. She made a beeline for the sign, holding her full term sized belly with one arm while she used the other arm to prop herself up against the numerous trunks of American Elm and White Ash. Stabs of increasingly intense stomach pains forced her to double over and inhale a series of shallow breaths several times before she made it through the dense barrier of old growth trees and reached a clearing. Lightning created fine fractal patterns across the palette of steel gray with every pang of contraction; the cracks of thunder creating a surround sound choral voice to the internal volleys, like cannon fire.
The woman in the clearing continued, never veering, making for the red sign, even as the contractions forced her to alternately moan and shout invectives like a tea kettle boiling over and piping out a steady pillar of steam; even as she stubbed her toes on low projections of granite and marble. Her right hand probed the darkness like a blind woman without a cane, occasionally grabbing onto tall slabs of stone, often brushing against engravings and knocking over remembrances and tokens. The chain of a necklace adorning one of the taller headstones slipped and slithered down the face of the tombstone and silently sank into the murky earth like a serpent retreating to the safety of a lower branch. A plastic infants bottle toppled at the lightest touch as if it was already teetering on the edge and waiting for any impetus to fall.
A pattern of stones became apparent, and she found a direct, unimpeded path to the southeast end of the graveyard and the bright crimson marquee, looming like a harvest moon just dipping into a jagged horizon of cottonwood and black locust tops. She was suddenly stymied by a slack chain link fence. She pushed against the sheer barricade, which yielded easily until it ran up against a secondary wall of tree trunks. Short, interspersed evergreen branches stuck through the holes of the fence and stabbed at her like nightsticks through prison bars. She probed the fence vertically only to find that its height exceeded her reach even on tip toes. She searched for an opening to the right; to the left. Nothing. No gate. No lock. Another vicious attack from her own viscera forced her down to one knee, and forced the escape of a slow, rolling, guttural roar, like a grizzly emerging from her den after a winters sleep and silence.
The dim light of far off headlights played through a gap in the obsidian bark and branches, and through the diamond-shaped openings of her sheet metal pen. She peered through the small slit, as if looking through a weakly powered microscope at distant Lilliputian diaspora. There, plain as day under the harsh sodium vapor flood lamps, and at the foot of the red hospital marquee, an ambulance sat, resting; its bay doors wide open, under a short awning, just feet from the automatic sliding doors of the hospitals emergency room entrance. A paramedic, in a clean blue jumper, kicked around an empty aluminum can while dragging a long pull on a fresh cigarette.
The woman in the graveyard clenched moist earth in two tense fists and sucked the damp air into the deepest pits of her lungs, opening alveoli that she had not tested since her very first piercing and desperate cries moments after being pulled from the security of her mothers womb. A flash of light strobed in the sky. She let out a scream that would send a shiver up a paraplegics spine. But a crack and roll of thunder muted the appeal. She persisted, draining her lungs of air and alternating the pitch in her cry like a demonic songbird. But still the sky and its own birthing pains shouted louder and longer. She screamed until she grew faint, until she couldnt muster even a single decibel. Physically she was spent and by nature she was mocked. Through the small lens of light between the black walnut boughs she saw the paramedic flick away the spent cigarette stub, turn his heel and return to his chariot. He sealed the rear doors of the ambulance and disappeared inside the warm and welcoming glow of the hospital atrium.
No, she pleaded. Only earthworms and aphids could hear her now.
The woman in the drivers seat was hunched over the steering wheel, periodically wiping away the collecting moisture from the windshield. The cab light was on directly over her head, giving her alabaster skin, light brown hair, and white gown an unearthly glow in the otherwise overwhelming darkness. She was no more than twenty five, with a complexion that evoked a pristine childhood of Sunday school, finger sandwiches, and hours perched on a perfect fathers shoulders chasing fireflies.
She coughed and a fine mist of red splattered against the windshield and its streaks of persistent fog producing an instant Pollock. A drip of blood crawled from the corner of her lips to her cheek. She drew her left hand across her mouth and considered the crimson stain on her palm. A sudden red glow filled the air on the other side of the windshield: brake lights.
The woman in the nightgown swerved the Buick into the opposite lane, across the double-yellow snake, and darted past the parked sedan. The antlers and mottled brown hair of a herd of deer were immediately illuminated. The mob of deer leapt across the two lane county road, diving into the tree line on the right; all clearing the station wagons path save one: a fawn, frozen; its eyes staring directly into her own.
The woman quickly yanked the steering wheel to the right, narrowly missing the young deer. She whipped the car back to the left but the station wagon fishtailed and the right rear tire slipped off the road and into a shallow ditch. The momentum carried the back half of the car completely off the asphalt. She tried to correct by pulling the wheel hard to the right, but the vehicle spun one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction, slipped off the pavement, completely into the ditch, finally coming to a stop at a steep angle, and facing back to where the deer had forced her to swerve. She found the headlights trained on the lonely fawn which hadnt moved at all.
The woman in the nightgown twisted at the key in the ignition, producing the staccato notes of a baying basset hound, but the engine wouldnt turn over. The headlights flicked on and off as the starter wheezed in its effort to spark the engine into life. The strobing light seemed to pull the young deer from its trance. It darted to the right, over the shallow ditch and into the dark forest. The other car crawled forward, slowly easing up next to the station wagon, but did not stop. The dark cab of the sedan revealed nothing about the intentions of its driver. The woman in the nightgown waved her arms towards the passing vehicle, but the car picked up speed and left her behind, turning into a fading pair of tiny red lights. She leaned on the horn in anger and disbelief.
Only a few seconds passed before another set of headlights approached. The woman leaned on the horn, pressing more frequently, creating a crude impression of Morse code. The passengers side headlamp of the approaching car was aimed low and to the right, like a lazy eye, and cast a useless spotlight immediately in front of the fender. The womans eyes grew wide in panicked recognition and she stopped honking. She fumbled with the lever to the side of the steering wheel until the headlights switched off, only to quickly realize that the cab light was still on. She furiously stabbed at the switch above her head and the car was plunged into pitch darkness. The woman in the nightgown pushed herself lower into the seat and a sudden stab of pain shot up from her abdomen and threatened to erupt from her mouth like a volcanic scream. She threw a hand over her mouth to suppress a wail.
A beat-up Ford F-150 blew by, the rattling of its loose headlamp somehow still audible over the chain smokers cough coming from the overworked V8 engine. The sounds of the truck subsided and left the womans patch of road a void of light and noise, like the bottom of a deep abyss. A gently rising wind rustled the limbs of surrounding trees, like a soft and aristocratic applause, inviting the symphony of hidden crickets and frogs to begin warming up for the evenings concert.
The woman in the station wagon tried turning the engine over several more times, to no avail. She threw open the drivers side door. It complained with a loud, rusty creak before coming to a premature stop, having dug itself into the moist earth just at the foot of the forest. She emerged from the uncomfortably narrow opening with her left hand supporting an enormous belly while her right hand steadied herself against the station wagon door. She grimaced as another wave of pain shot through her very core. The sound of a swiftly moving river pervaded every cubic inch of the surrounding air, filling the spaces between every limb and every leaf. The bank of the Wabash River was directly behind her, maybe fifty feet from the other edge of the road. She looked in the opposite direction, dipping her line of sight beneath and between branches as she scanned the entire landscape.
There it was! The red, illuminated sign of Logansport State Hospital. She could just make out a corner of the sign, but it was so familiar, like a childs familiarity with the features of a favorite stuffed animal, that even a molecule of it betrayed the entire specimen. She made a beeline for the sign, holding her full term sized belly with one arm while she used the other arm to prop herself up against the numerous trunks of American Elm and White Ash. Stabs of increasingly intense stomach pains forced her to double over and inhale a series of shallow breaths several times before she made it through the dense barrier of old growth trees and reached a clearing. Lightning created fine fractal patterns across the palette of steel gray with every pang of contraction; the cracks of thunder creating a surround sound choral voice to the internal volleys, like cannon fire.
The woman in the clearing continued, never veering, making for the red sign, even as the contractions forced her to alternately moan and shout invectives like a tea kettle boiling over and piping out a steady pillar of steam; even as she stubbed her toes on low projections of granite and marble. Her right hand probed the darkness like a blind woman without a cane, occasionally grabbing onto tall slabs of stone, often brushing against engravings and knocking over remembrances and tokens. The chain of a necklace adorning one of the taller headstones slipped and slithered down the face of the tombstone and silently sank into the murky earth like a serpent retreating to the safety of a lower branch. A plastic infants bottle toppled at the lightest touch as if it was already teetering on the edge and waiting for any impetus to fall.
A pattern of stones became apparent, and she found a direct, unimpeded path to the southeast end of the graveyard and the bright crimson marquee, looming like a harvest moon just dipping into a jagged horizon of cottonwood and black locust tops. She was suddenly stymied by a slack chain link fence. She pushed against the sheer barricade, which yielded easily until it ran up against a secondary wall of tree trunks. Short, interspersed evergreen branches stuck through the holes of the fence and stabbed at her like nightsticks through prison bars. She probed the fence vertically only to find that its height exceeded her reach even on tip toes. She searched for an opening to the right; to the left. Nothing. No gate. No lock. Another vicious attack from her own viscera forced her down to one knee, and forced the escape of a slow, rolling, guttural roar, like a grizzly emerging from her den after a winters sleep and silence.
The dim light of far off headlights played through a gap in the obsidian bark and branches, and through the diamond-shaped openings of her sheet metal pen. She peered through the small slit, as if looking through a weakly powered microscope at distant Lilliputian diaspora. There, plain as day under the harsh sodium vapor flood lamps, and at the foot of the red hospital marquee, an ambulance sat, resting; its bay doors wide open, under a short awning, just feet from the automatic sliding doors of the hospitals emergency room entrance. A paramedic, in a clean blue jumper, kicked around an empty aluminum can while dragging a long pull on a fresh cigarette.
The woman in the graveyard clenched moist earth in two tense fists and sucked the damp air into the deepest pits of her lungs, opening alveoli that she had not tested since her very first piercing and desperate cries moments after being pulled from the security of her mothers womb. A flash of light strobed in the sky. She let out a scream that would send a shiver up a paraplegics spine. But a crack and roll of thunder muted the appeal. She persisted, draining her lungs of air and alternating the pitch in her cry like a demonic songbird. But still the sky and its own birthing pains shouted louder and longer. She screamed until she grew faint, until she couldnt muster even a single decibel. Physically she was spent and by nature she was mocked. Through the small lens of light between the black walnut boughs she saw the paramedic flick away the spent cigarette stub, turn his heel and return to his chariot. He sealed the rear doors of the ambulance and disappeared inside the warm and welcoming glow of the hospital atrium.
No, she pleaded. Only earthworms and aphids could hear her now.
).