The Beauty of the Night

Beautiful Crash

"Mom, can you hear me?" Morgan asked, crushing her iPhone between her shoulder and her ear. She was leaving a non-descript office building that housed a working-group within NASA. She had just been promoted to team lead for neurolinguistic programming, and she wanted to tell her mother. But no matter how advanced Morgan's technical skills were, she still couldn't manage to bring her mom into the 21st century.

"Morgan? Can you hear me? Hello? This dang phone..."

Three beeps sounded in Morgan's ear, signaling that her mother had hung up. She sighed and pushed her long dark hair out of her face. Juggling her work bag, and a briefcase of equations that she would be working on at home, she pulled her phone away from her ear and dialed the same number.

"Mom?" Morgan asked when she heard her mother pick up. "Mom, can you hear me? I got the promotion!"

"Did you say you got the promotion?" her mother squealed excitedly into her ear. A blossom of laughter erupted from Morgan's lips.

"Yes!" she squealed back in an equal tone, fumbling through her bag for her car keys. "I'm incharge of NLP! I've already been given funding to get a team together to work on that microchip I told you about."

In her car, Morgan quickly plugged her phone in so that her mother's next words came through loudly on all the speakers.

"Congratulations, Gigi!" she cooed, using a pet name that only emerged when Morgan had accomplished something particularly worthy of praise. "Tell me again what the chip does? I remember you said it's something like Google translate, but in your brain? Wait, hold on a minute, your father's calling... How do I...?"

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Morgan rolled her eyes, but couldn't keep the grin off of her lips. She would give her mom a couple of minutes before trying to call her again. She pulled out of her parking spot with a satisfied sigh. At 28 years old, she would be NASA's youngest ever female team lead on such a big department. Who would've thought that her combined degrees in Computer Science and Linguistics would result in this?

She swiped her badge to exit the parking lot. Instead of making her usual right turn towards home, this time she made a left. Morgan was a tall woman, about five feet and ten inches, but she still loved a good pair of high heels. She had been keeping tabs on a pair that she had seen online, but hadn't had a good reason to spend such an exorbitant amount of money. But now with the promotion, she had reason enough.

She glanced away from the road briefly to navigate her car's touch screen and call her mother back.

"Gigi?" her mom called. "Dad's here! I told him about your promotion!"

"Congratulations, bug!" her dad cheered in the background. "I knew you were a genius."

Morgan laughed. "Thanks, dad! If everything goes well with this chip, soon I'll be able to speak to both grandmas and they won't have an excuse to pretend they don't understand me."

Her parents laughed at that. Her mother was of Mexican heritage, and her father was Norwegian. Neither of their parents had made much of an attempt to learn English, so Morgan's relationship with her grandmothers was based on sign language, laughs and hugs. It was the reason Morgan had been so curious about linguistics in the first place. So in a way, she had them to thank.

"Are you on your way home?" her mom asked. "Why don't you stop by here and let Dad and I take you out to dinner to celebrate?"

"I'd love that! But I'll be a little late. I'm on a quick detour to Cabana," she said. At the mention of the high-end boutique's name, her mom gave an excited squeal.

"Are you finally going to get those shoes? You should get them in red, Gigi, they'll complement your skin."

"I know, ma," Morgan laughed as she shifted her foot from the break to the gas pedal. "I--"

From the intersecting street, a semi-truck which had recently been stolen, plowed through the intersection at speeds greater than 90 miles per hour. In seconds, Morgan's little silver Prius was entirely flattened, leaving little less than a streak and some glass debris at the intersection.