It drizzles, and halfway to the hospital I remember my dangling cigarette and the old man’s coffee, remember that I was supposed to bring it to him, and I’m thinking and thinking and thinking at sixty-five miles per hour on this smooth residential road, until an empty playground, the red swings rocking in the now-heavy rain, catches my attention, my breath, and when I snap forward and exhale my car clips a brown telephone pole and spirals onto a cracked concrete lot. Glass shatters and the tumbling momentum flings me and the world upside down right side up and the car and me slide with blue skidding sparks and with the taste of rust in my mouth, and then the car rolls scrapes rolls to a stop. The green car is on its side and one small wind could push it on top of me and so no wonder I want to free my leg from where it’s trapped under the side of the car and when I do there is no pain not unlike childhood and red swings and returnables of all hard glass and laughter and the good feelings there in the dark, and when I look at my leg the skin is peeled back my pulsing meat in my face and I grab the flap of skin and flip it over my exposed bone and have you ever tried to walk in such a time of great rupture?

The rain is thick, wet, and cold. The car hisses, steams. The trees and their limbs rustle like my fingers shake. I rise and take but one step, and on the ground I drag myself to the road and there is already a hand on my shoulder turning me over and I see the line of cars with people marching to me, a dozen ships of ideas aiming for this shore once again.

As they did with Mom, the EMTs grab me and lift me and settle me and poke me and quiet me and I recognize the man who would not let me leave and I say something something something to him but his thin lips shush me and he pokes me again and I sit up to see my skin covered with a red cloth and time lurches forward with such speed to the emergency room that I’m there in a bustling room white curtain pulled closed and blue soft masks floating about me, and it goes how it should go the pain is hitting and a woman is yelling for her baby, and I feel bad that she lost that baby, hope she finds it, and before I’m put under to the sound of her screaming behind the curtain I grab the doc by the sleeve, say to the doc, “Does my mother know I’m here?”

Smokes Last

SMOKES LAST