Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 19 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I interposed a city block between my car and the police station. I wound through the streets like Pac-Man in a maze. Scanning for patrol cars, I tracked vehicles crossing my path and those in my lane. I anticipated sirens erupting from the engine whine. The two times a cruiser appeared, I hunched behind the wheel, looped the block like a roundabout, and resumed my route.
I veered toward the mall. The engine’s backfires—smoker’s coughs—drew pedestrians’ stares. When I reached the mall’s street, I parallel-parked in reverse, trunk facing the plaza, wedging my car between a Hyundai Sonata and a delivery van where two workers unloaded food crates.
My heart raced. My Adam’s apple lodged in my throat as if I teetered on a cliff’s edge. Vision blurred red at the edges. Leaving the engine running, I circled to the trunk, keyed the lock, and lifted the lid. A stench assaulted me—the defense spray of some cephalopodan cosmic abomination. I held my breath as I hauled out the corpse, stepped back, and set the dripping bundle on the pavement.
I uncovered the child by tearing through the plastic. It was like peeling a bandage from a festering wound—wet, sucking sounds accompanied the separation, as strands of viscous slime stretched away from the greenish, blistered skin. With every shred of plastic I discarded, pale worms tumbled out, writhing atop splatters of filth like mutilated figures. The corpse’s crumpled form expanded like a soaked sponge, while beneath it spread a widening pool of putrid fluid clotted with clumps of sodden soil.
Shouts erupted. I straightened to face the arc of a crowd resembling a parting school of fish before a shark. Their soap, shampoo, and aftershave scents, of this dozen of people who had taken showers and readied for work or to go shopping, formed a levee against the rot. A gallery of horrified faces glistened in the sun. A woman shielded a sobbing girl’s eyes and fled. A bug-eyed man alternated between gaping at the boy and me. A deliveryman insulted and shoved me, then stumbled aside to vomit.
I pointed at the corpse.
“That boy belongs to you.”
Some retreated; others replaced them. A man and a pair of teens dialed phones, eager to share the news with the police. Others aimed their phones horizontally or vertically to shoot their flashes or record. Each electronic imitation of a camera’s shutter click made me yearn to hide. My legs itched to run. Our ruin—the boy’s and mine—would flood screens nationwide, tethering my existence to these images forever.
The scream-weary left, leaving flushed faces demanding answers or hurling insults. A few smiled at their phones as if gifted a bonus. Strange people who needed to prove they’d been here and witnessed this.
I faced the lenses, let the flashes blind me. Let them see. Let it sear those lives that depended on convincing themselves that aberrations like the boy and myself didn’t exist, that nobody would run over a child and then parade its rotting corpse. Let this knowledge fester in their minds like the memories of shame, defeat, loss.
Darkness enveloped them like a net. Taught since childhood that light banishes horrors, they had forgotten the truth: our universe’s dark web, speckled with glowing motes and smears, teemed with monsters waiting for the day we forgot their forms and ceased to understand them.
Here I stand. I exist.
The crowd stirred. Two black officers, same ones from the station, shouldered through, ordering dispersal. They emerged like boxers entering a ring. Before the corpse lying in a pool of its own juices, one of the officers recoiled, the other covered his mouth.
I lunged toward the asphalt. The coffee-haired officer drew his pistol, but as he shouted “Stop!”, I ducked beneath the roofline, slid into the car, and hit the gas. Swerving through screeching traffic, I rocketed down the street. In the rearview, those shrinking officers piled into their cruiser. They activated the police lights.
The rear wheels of my car skidded on the curves while the cops’ siren howled from side to side like a giant in pursuit. I weaved through the vehicles, rigid in my seat, blood roaring in my eardrums. I was racing against the clock along the dirt roads of an oil field.
As we sped toward an intersection, another patrol car showed up in the perpendicular lane. Behind the windshield, both officers craned their necks. They flicked on their lights and sirens and surged into the chase.
Five blocks later, three patrol cars crowded my rearview mirror. The officers’ faces and the darkened lenses of their sunglasses loomed through the glare sweeping across their windshields. One cop pressed a two-way radio to his mouth. As we raced past, cars, SUVs, vans, and pickups veered aside like panicked animals, while herds of pedestrians scrambled across crosswalks as though fleeing an advancing torrent of lava.
Four patrol cars. Red and blue lights flooded my cabin. Voices barked through megaphones, ordering me to stop, their commands shattered by bursts of static. They kept shouting even though they knew I’d refuse.
On the deserted asphalt straights, a patrol car would surge forward, slamming its bumper’s edge into my trunk, trying to spin my car like a top, but I wrestled the wheel, keeping it straight. Through the curves, I skidded sideways. The vial filled with shrapnel, dangling from a string tied to the rearview mirror, swung at forty-five-degree angles—left, then right—mirroring how my torso lurched toward the door or the gearstick. The chassis groaned; my seat shuddered. Acrid smoke that reeked of scorched rubber streamed in through the window, masking the lingering stench of rot, the ghost of a corpse.
I merged into the route I took every afternoon on my way home. Why not? I entered the street where, three hundred yards ahead, five days a week, I would turn to park in front of my apartment building. Down the street, a photorealistic mural painted on the face of a cliff depicted a strip of road narrowing toward the horizon, where the asphalt rippled and the silhouettes of cars, pedestrians, signs, and traffic lights seethed together like food sizzling in a skillet.
I pictured myself swerving, parking in front of the building, and sprinting upstairs—my lungs searing—all the way to my apartment. The roar of policemen shoving one another up the stairs in a chaotic stampede would grow louder. I’d rip out a sheet of notebook paper, hastily write “sorry for the mess” in ballpoint pen, and set the sheet on the entryway table, next to the jumble of old keys and coins.
My fingers, clenched around the steering wheel, had gone numb. My arms had stiffened into rigidity. The car was about to slam into the painted backdrop hurtling toward me. For a quarter-mile, the road snaked through manicured grass before emptying into a parking lot that encircled single-story buildings—structures resembling houses torn loose by a flood and deposited miles away, alongside a Mexican restaurant and a Jack in the Box. Behind them, a towering pillar bore the Chevron gas station logo, reaching skyward. Once I collided with that photorealistic panorama, the car’s frame would crumple like an accordion, my flesh and bones would shatter, and blood would jet under pressure from every orifice and gash.
But the car sliced through the mirage and continued down the street. The serpentine road lashed like a whip until it yielded to the parking lot. The Mexican restaurant and the Jack in the Box, behind whose windows shadowy figures shifted, slid past my left, unveiling the gas station they had concealed. There, a woman angled the nozzle of a gasoline pump toward her car’s fuel tank. The pillar swept across my window like an opaque band in a scanner’s pass.
Along both sidewalks, new shops lined the streets, their display windows alive with flickering glimmers. Pedestrians halted or turned to follow the commotion of the chase. A couple—the boy seated on a bench, the girl perched on his lap—craned their necks and tensed as if to stand. A woman pushing a stroller swiftly veered off, pressing herself against a building entrance. Two men in suits, one silver-haired and the other with a jet-black goatee, shook their heads as they watched the fabric of order unravel.
Stabs of light pierced through the darkness, and now that I sharpened my gaze, I could glimpse the lines linking those stabs, hinting at shapes. Patterns to decipher.
The speedometer needle quivered, the shrapnel vial swayed, the engine roared and backfired, and I laughed and laughed. A world was being born for me.
THE END
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally written in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “3 Legged Animals” by Califone.
I interposed a city block between my car and the police station. I wound through the streets like Pac-Man in a maze. Scanning for patrol cars, I tracked vehicles crossing my path and those in my lane. I anticipated sirens erupting from the engine whine. The two times a cruiser appeared, I hunched behind the wheel, looped the block like a roundabout, and resumed my route.
I veered toward the mall. The engine’s backfires—smoker’s coughs—drew pedestrians’ stares. When I reached the mall’s street, I parallel-parked in reverse, trunk facing the plaza, wedging my car between a Hyundai Sonata and a delivery van where two workers unloaded food crates.
My heart raced. My Adam’s apple lodged in my throat as if I teetered on a cliff’s edge. Vision blurred red at the edges. Leaving the engine running, I circled to the trunk, keyed the lock, and lifted the lid. A stench assaulted me—the defense spray of some cephalopodan cosmic abomination. I held my breath as I hauled out the corpse, stepped back, and set the dripping bundle on the pavement.
I uncovered the child by tearing through the plastic. It was like peeling a bandage from a festering wound—wet, sucking sounds accompanied the separation, as strands of viscous slime stretched away from the greenish, blistered skin. With every shred of plastic I discarded, pale worms tumbled out, writhing atop splatters of filth like mutilated figures. The corpse’s crumpled form expanded like a soaked sponge, while beneath it spread a widening pool of putrid fluid clotted with clumps of sodden soil.
Shouts erupted. I straightened to face the arc of a crowd resembling a parting school of fish before a shark. Their soap, shampoo, and aftershave scents, of this dozen of people who had taken showers and readied for work or to go shopping, formed a levee against the rot. A gallery of horrified faces glistened in the sun. A woman shielded a sobbing girl’s eyes and fled. A bug-eyed man alternated between gaping at the boy and me. A deliveryman insulted and shoved me, then stumbled aside to vomit.
I pointed at the corpse.
“That boy belongs to you.”
Some retreated; others replaced them. A man and a pair of teens dialed phones, eager to share the news with the police. Others aimed their phones horizontally or vertically to shoot their flashes or record. Each electronic imitation of a camera’s shutter click made me yearn to hide. My legs itched to run. Our ruin—the boy’s and mine—would flood screens nationwide, tethering my existence to these images forever.
The scream-weary left, leaving flushed faces demanding answers or hurling insults. A few smiled at their phones as if gifted a bonus. Strange people who needed to prove they’d been here and witnessed this.
I faced the lenses, let the flashes blind me. Let them see. Let it sear those lives that depended on convincing themselves that aberrations like the boy and myself didn’t exist, that nobody would run over a child and then parade its rotting corpse. Let this knowledge fester in their minds like the memories of shame, defeat, loss.
Darkness enveloped them like a net. Taught since childhood that light banishes horrors, they had forgotten the truth: our universe’s dark web, speckled with glowing motes and smears, teemed with monsters waiting for the day we forgot their forms and ceased to understand them.
Here I stand. I exist.
The crowd stirred. Two black officers, same ones from the station, shouldered through, ordering dispersal. They emerged like boxers entering a ring. Before the corpse lying in a pool of its own juices, one of the officers recoiled, the other covered his mouth.
I lunged toward the asphalt. The coffee-haired officer drew his pistol, but as he shouted “Stop!”, I ducked beneath the roofline, slid into the car, and hit the gas. Swerving through screeching traffic, I rocketed down the street. In the rearview, those shrinking officers piled into their cruiser. They activated the police lights.
The rear wheels of my car skidded on the curves while the cops’ siren howled from side to side like a giant in pursuit. I weaved through the vehicles, rigid in my seat, blood roaring in my eardrums. I was racing against the clock along the dirt roads of an oil field.
As we sped toward an intersection, another patrol car showed up in the perpendicular lane. Behind the windshield, both officers craned their necks. They flicked on their lights and sirens and surged into the chase.
Five blocks later, three patrol cars crowded my rearview mirror. The officers’ faces and the darkened lenses of their sunglasses loomed through the glare sweeping across their windshields. One cop pressed a two-way radio to his mouth. As we raced past, cars, SUVs, vans, and pickups veered aside like panicked animals, while herds of pedestrians scrambled across crosswalks as though fleeing an advancing torrent of lava.
Four patrol cars. Red and blue lights flooded my cabin. Voices barked through megaphones, ordering me to stop, their commands shattered by bursts of static. They kept shouting even though they knew I’d refuse.
On the deserted asphalt straights, a patrol car would surge forward, slamming its bumper’s edge into my trunk, trying to spin my car like a top, but I wrestled the wheel, keeping it straight. Through the curves, I skidded sideways. The vial filled with shrapnel, dangling from a string tied to the rearview mirror, swung at forty-five-degree angles—left, then right—mirroring how my torso lurched toward the door or the gearstick. The chassis groaned; my seat shuddered. Acrid smoke that reeked of scorched rubber streamed in through the window, masking the lingering stench of rot, the ghost of a corpse.
I merged into the route I took every afternoon on my way home. Why not? I entered the street where, three hundred yards ahead, five days a week, I would turn to park in front of my apartment building. Down the street, a photorealistic mural painted on the face of a cliff depicted a strip of road narrowing toward the horizon, where the asphalt rippled and the silhouettes of cars, pedestrians, signs, and traffic lights seethed together like food sizzling in a skillet.
I pictured myself swerving, parking in front of the building, and sprinting upstairs—my lungs searing—all the way to my apartment. The roar of policemen shoving one another up the stairs in a chaotic stampede would grow louder. I’d rip out a sheet of notebook paper, hastily write “sorry for the mess” in ballpoint pen, and set the sheet on the entryway table, next to the jumble of old keys and coins.
My fingers, clenched around the steering wheel, had gone numb. My arms had stiffened into rigidity. The car was about to slam into the painted backdrop hurtling toward me. For a quarter-mile, the road snaked through manicured grass before emptying into a parking lot that encircled single-story buildings—structures resembling houses torn loose by a flood and deposited miles away, alongside a Mexican restaurant and a Jack in the Box. Behind them, a towering pillar bore the Chevron gas station logo, reaching skyward. Once I collided with that photorealistic panorama, the car’s frame would crumple like an accordion, my flesh and bones would shatter, and blood would jet under pressure from every orifice and gash.
But the car sliced through the mirage and continued down the street. The serpentine road lashed like a whip until it yielded to the parking lot. The Mexican restaurant and the Jack in the Box, behind whose windows shadowy figures shifted, slid past my left, unveiling the gas station they had concealed. There, a woman angled the nozzle of a gasoline pump toward her car’s fuel tank. The pillar swept across my window like an opaque band in a scanner’s pass.
Along both sidewalks, new shops lined the streets, their display windows alive with flickering glimmers. Pedestrians halted or turned to follow the commotion of the chase. A couple—the boy seated on a bench, the girl perched on his lap—craned their necks and tensed as if to stand. A woman pushing a stroller swiftly veered off, pressing herself against a building entrance. Two men in suits, one silver-haired and the other with a jet-black goatee, shook their heads as they watched the fabric of order unravel.
Stabs of light pierced through the darkness, and now that I sharpened my gaze, I could glimpse the lines linking those stabs, hinting at shapes. Patterns to decipher.
The speedometer needle quivered, the shrapnel vial swayed, the engine roared and backfired, and I laughed and laughed. A world was being born for me.
THE END
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally written in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “3 Legged Animals” by Califone.
No comments have been added yet.
