A Better Ending

short fiction

The radio kept playing, even after you wrapped your car like a lover around the tree.

That night you made a molotov cocktail and threw it through your father’s window. His trailer went up like it was built to burn and oh honey, my baby, my love: you panicked. He wasn’t even home. You got in the shitty red truck that used to be his and you drove like brakes didn’t exist. You saw flames in the rearview, hallucinated sirens in the distance.

Like I said, honey, you panicked, you fucking lost it.

The speedometer climbed to seventy, to ninety, and you just let it. You were desperate for an alibi, for a way to stop time. You found one.

The collision was over before it even began. Your engine crumpled, started billowing smoke. The smell of burning fuel carried on the breeze for miles. The cicadas in the trees kept you company as you started to slip away. Oh, but you’re so stubborn. Your blood always ran magma hot. You were born with a thorn in your side and an atomic bomb in your chest. “Not like this,” you said to the trees. Your throat caught, your eyes filled. That wasn’t it. That’s not what you meant, not really. “Not by myself,” you said to the moon.

And although this is the moment where your engine caught fire, the radio played on. It played a song no one’s heard before, a song no one will hear again, because this one was yours. Everything you were, everything you felt, translated by your soul into melody, into verse. You watched as flames licked up at the branches, as they climbed closer to your ruined, helpless body in the truck, and you started to sing. You knew the words to a song you’ve never heard because it’s the song of your life. You wrote it with every heart you left bleeding by the side of the road, with every tender word you let escape your lips: it’s all here in the rise and fall of the chorus, in the build-up to the end.

You sang, your pleading voice emerging from your sandpaper throat, while you sat dazed beneath the catastrophe of the shattered windshield, the volume lowering, the music slowing, along with your heartbeat. You were delirious with death, dizzied by the inevitably of it. You felt your body vibrate, a comforting sensation. You were being changed, transformed, so your soul could migrate to its next destination. A body is unwieldy, heavy, full of needs. Your soul was being separated, but the body, it still bleeds.

Your song grew fainter until it was almost gone. Your spine long-crushed, torso impaled by the steering column. Your brain firing wildly in total desperation, every neuron racing in panicked circles. The fading electricity circulating just to beg for more time. Angels kissed your eyelids and let you see the past. One more listen to the music of your mother’s laugh, one more beer on the porch with your little brother, before you ruined everything, before you hated each other. The pieces of your father have been broken for so long, you don’t have any memories worth looking back at. But oh, the angels provide; You’re four years old. Your father is young, sweat-slicked and sun-kissed, more alive than anyone has seen him before or since. His knuckles have not yet collided with your ocular bone, nor your mother’s solar plexus. Right now, or right then, he’s carrying you on his shoulders through the woods, showing you which berries are safe to eat. He stops at the blackberries, picks a handful for you. Soon your impossibly tiny fingers are stained a deep purple and he lets you draw kitty cat whiskers on his face with the sweet, dark juice. He’s laughing while you do this, giggling really, and you can’t believe it but he swings you back up, up, up, impossibly high, until you are flying into the sun. You are his little Icarus, never mind that he’s the one who gave you those useless wax wings in the first place, because in this moment you can taste the bitter June blackberries and you can actually feel his love (for the first, and last, time.)

But you were so young, it was such a short trip. You asked the angels, “Is that all there is?” as blood pooled in your seat, as your punctured lungs gave you what was left of their air, you managed a request, “one more kiss with my hands in her hair?”

The angels obliged, let you feel it one last time. First love exploded behind your dying eyes. A kaleidoscope of stolen glances, of grasping hands, the sensation of summer on the tongue. You realized something then, that life was always just a song. It was always in the background, it’s been playing all along. It played every night your mother cried herself to sleep, it played as young lovers dove into rivers dark and deep . It played as you staggered home from every drunken fight, as I placed raw steaks on each of your black eyes. But god, how the orchestra swells when your lips touch mine! The violins come in to sing their sad song, about a love lost, both of your fires burning all wrong.

You realize all of this in less than a second. Time moves differently for you now. You spend your last breaths laughing. You open your mouth wide, jaw cracking, finally breaking at the hinge. You smile defiantly to show God what’s left of your broken, shattered teeth. The car is a mess of blood and glass, the porcelain of your molars covering the dash. But still, you can’t help but laugh. You’re laughing because before your truck met the tree, the universe felt so small, so claustrophobic, but now you see how it goes on and on in every direction. The past is not dead, the future is a song we haven’t heard yet. You realize that life was never a test.

Finally, you close your eyes. You let love take you to whatever comes next.

That night, you came to my bedside, crouched down, whispered low:

“It isn’t how you think it is. I’ve never felt anything so fast or so slow. It takes an eternity and no time whatsoever. This is not all there is, it goes on, forever and ever.”

I awoke to the lingering scent of scorched diesel.

A distant radio played a song that I still can’t place.