December 21, 2009
Seven minutes
It happened one night…
The entire floor was quiet except for Mr. Burnaby’s TV two doors down and the persistent hum of ICU machinery. The nurse’s station was dull, past changeover and into the monotony of the lonely hours before sunrise. I was lying awake listening to my own machines, feeling the IV pressure in my forearm and the pain in my back. A morphine drip is a great thing if it allows you to sleep but if it is too regulated, all it does is gently numb you and send your mind spinning out of control. I could hear the Home Shopping Network trying to sell Burnaby some carpet cleaner that he would never use. Then I heard a gargle and a cough, then a loud gasp. Nothing happened immediately but it was nighttime and you never know who’s going to make it through the night and who’s not.


Twelve minutes
The rain slick road…
Meandered lightless deeper and deeper into the country, away from her urban comfort zone. Her hands on the wheel were as white as her headlights shining two piercing holes into the darkness. Who in the hell would want to live out here? No lights anywhere, no people, no fluorescent metropolis to feel significant, no other cars…only ominous forest bordering a black ribbon that seemed to continue on and on. She was supposed to meet him at his family’s fishing cabin at MP 317, about a two and a half hour drive but was that at 80 miles per hour, or 60 or 50? She’d been driving nearly three hours and hadn’t seen a mile marker in forever. The gas tank had a quarter left so at least she could stay warm and dry while continuing to drive. All roads end in a town somewhere, right? Somewhere with a hotel and a restaurant? She was afraid to stop and pee for fear of losing herself to the night. How irrational but when one is born and bred to love the city there is no reason to leave it, not the least of which is driving alone into nothingness and getting lost. No Starbucks, no street lights, no cabs, just far out darkness. A mile marker ahead says MP338. Great, she passed it 20 minutes ago and didn’t even notice a driveway let alone the marker. He had better be there, she thought, or she would just keep on driving back to the city as fast and as far as she could.


Ten minutes
Once upon a time…
In a little boy’s bedroom postered with the baseball gods of the day, a dream took place that was to be as unshakeable as the boys faith that the sun would rise in the morning, giving one more chance to better himself, take one more step toward finding his dream. In the morning, before school started, he would dress in a worn out pair of jeans and slip on his favorite Griffey Jr. jersey, grab his glove and a ball and race outside before his mother could stop him. There was a six foot high wall at the end of his block that acted as both a barrier holding Mr. Mason’s garden up and as an automatic grounder machine for Petey. Petey would throw the ball at the bricks and field it coming back. Sometimes it would hit a corner of a brick and shoot the ball out at an angle so he would have to range deep in the hole like Ozzie, backhand the tattered ball and, depending on if there was one out or two, flip to the wall for the start of a double play, or turn, plant, and fire to first for the out. Petey was tireless. Coming in for breakfast not by choice he would be flushed and out of breath but staunch in his belief that he would be a big leaguer some day. His mother sent him to school with a smile and a curious shake of her head wondering what it was that boys dreamed about.


Fifteen minutes
Two lanes…
Is all that was opened in rush hour Friday, on a holiday weekend. Who the fuck comes up with these rules, Charles screams to himself in his airtight Lexus stuck in first gear with a glass of scotch on the middle console. Two goddamned weeks of shitty days stacked one atop the other like cordwood, his wife cheating on him and his high school boy arrested for possession on school grounds, grade school grounds no less. Charles needed louder, edgier music so Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam let it go with a scathing ‘Rearview Mirror’. Looking in his, he saw a couple, silently staring straight ahead, probably not at him but through him and he could imagine the stagnant air between them, commuting home together to their 2,000 square foot loft with emptiness to keep them company upon arrival. He dreaded his house right now, an angry, hurt but well fucked (apparently) soon to be ex-wife on her third martini and second xanax while his boy was in his room probably weighing up bags and his other child, a nine year old beauty with innocence in her eyes and joyful curls around her face, watched TV or quietly sat reading her book. If she was the only normal one, then they had done well. Up ahead he was the telltale red and blue lights of emergency lighting up the ceiling of the tunnel he was about to enter. Swallowing his scotch, curiosity swept down on him like the warm afterglow of his commuter toddy. Inching into the tunnel, flares lit the walls and splintered glass littered the pavement along with broken pieces of the auto industry. Two ambulances had their rear door open, waiting for death to be inserted. Bags on stretchers. Blood on the pavement. Lives short and ended too quickly.
Maybe home wasn’t such a bad place to be going after all..