BLEED

Back Seat Dying

     I'd been on a lot of road trips by the time I was twenty something, from Ohio to Florida, from Florida to California, all over the country really. I had been in the backseats of vans, trucks, limos and the trunks of plenty more on my way to all sorts of places. Didn't matter if it was a festival, convention, or just visiting family. I usually just zonked out, enjoyed the ride till we got there. The soft hum of the tires rolling over the blacktop, the little rumble of the running engine just rocking you slightly side to side, and the hush of the wind outside the windows sailing you away to sleep. Absolutely loved it, some of the best sleep I'd ever gotten actually. Hundreds of miles gained and journeyed all with my eyes closed, off fighting imaginary wars in dream land. Now I was fighting a real war, a war with my body, my mind, my fucking patience to stay awake. Just trying to keep all of this insanity straight in the back of someone else's car, in the back of this bastards lemon. Smelling the series of butted cigarettes that lined the floor of the backseats, and an indiscernible scent of sawdust? 

     "Comfortable, bud?" Rasped the voice from the front seat. My eye trying its best to meet his in the rear view mirror, those silver dollars shining back in the reflection like two pale moons questioning what the tide had dragged in. As if he hadn't fully witnessed his actions as he plowed through me like a soft bag of flour, sending all my powdery white insides across the side of the street, and all over one oblivious and apparently color blind salesman. As if he couldn't see my strewn in his back seat, arm hooked behind my back, leg folded in like it was designed to be travel friendly. I could feel something rising in my throat, bile likely, all that blood and bun now finding its own way out of my stomach, but that wasn't at all what came out in the spittle of gore, no it was a tirade that turned my flattening lung into a compressed piece of elastic. A tirade entirely fueled by the teenage angst that swells up, never having left that young adult mind, just hiding behind layers of logical recompense and proper manners, a moral compass if you will. I flung that fuckin thing out the window.

     I often wonder if the actions I took hear solidified my fate, catapulting me into this catatonically dark future I was yet to be made aware of. For right now I believed I'd been hit by a car, dragged from the street, and tossed in the back by some deranged man in his late forties while everyone around us simply paid no damn mind. I had also believed that my time was nigh, if anyone was going to turn my body into plaything or whatever evils they've planned I certainly wouldn't let it be this man. This malformed figure of mine deserves to be drawn up in some CoSi related set piece, where a group of students can point with feigned interest at my exposed cadaver set in glass, wafting the ever present aroma of morbid knowledge and formaldehyde. Not dragged from the street and tossed into the back of some gross yellow car with all the pretentious air of a rich man who just has to show he's saving the environment, look it gets twenty miles to the gallon and still pollutes half as much! And I think the idea of my obituary reading : Tomlin Gaines, killed by lemon- Is what led to me stretching out for the steering wheel as if every drop of strength and muscle I had left was demanding it from me. Certainly shocked the bastard as much as I did myself, when my hand coiled around the rim and yanked.
     "What in the fu-" was all the translucent skinned man could muster as we flung off road, tires catching nothing but air as they sailed us into a ditch. The city had disappeared around us, now backwoods trees and a low hanging sun were our surroundings. Not towering concrete but monoliths of bark  wood and leaves, their shadows dancing across the lemon given, now squeezed out by the ground it was meeting. Glass splintering into a mosaic around me and him as I flung from the backseat to the frontseat to the windshield and back again. My body contorting to degrees never thought possible, I could hear my algebra teacher somewhere in the back of all my thoughts shouting, "Now that's an acute angle!". As if my body wasn't already a mulicfied mess, I could now visibly see that half mile which should be wound up inside my belly strung out like tinsel, intestines drooped over headrest, console and rear view mirror, which now hung entirely upside down. Or rather the lemon had flipped, the tires still rotating in a wailing chorus as steam hissed from the smoking engine. I'd be meeting that enigmatic end, I could feel it coming now, if one crash wouldn't take me the second one would carry me straight into the arms of some maker and I'm sure they'd laugh as I got there. "You were buying a hotdog? You got killed over a missing hotdog?" And those vibrant angels or devils would cackle and point, their sides nearly busting as I'm sure they've not seen a sadder display in the recent years. Oh yes they'd be quite content with that mess of me arriving, they'd probably look at me like a puzzle as they shoved all my goods and niceties back into place, sewing me into what I should've been. Then after all their laughter I'd be sent on my way, to one of those many endings, to the thousands of possible heavens and hells of the imaginative believer, and boy would I be smiling from ear to ear, knowing all that misery finally ceased, all the ridicule and hardships worth it to achieve a wonderful afterlife. All the good deeds and hits taken throughout my tenous existence would finally amount to a greater reason as to why I would be the one squeezed out of his chances at life by a wriggling sperm driving a lemon.
     But alas the white lights, the happy chorus of horns and laughing spirits would not come, but a haunting chuckle of a vile thing that wrapped its cold claws about my spirit and raked me back to the material world. The haunting silver dollar eyes like flashing medallions in the flames, now erupting from the engine as he looked down upon me through the back door which lay twenty or so feet from the main chasis. How fear could find its way back up a half mile of tinsel and guts to make me wretch at his sight, the miracles of the body. I'd of screamed as he dragged me out of the back, if any air could find its way between the terror and confusion of my spiderweb body, broken apart and dangling from sinew and muscle as if I were some child's stretch toy. No I could not scream, I could not fight it more than I had already, my final effort reaching for that wheel only for this clown to live through it, how the fuck did he survive such a crash? There wasn't even a blemish on that hooked nose, not a mark of worry or shit even an emotion besides deviant smiles that bore teeth I'd of sworn were filed.
      "Lad you are right out of your head!" He said grunting, his foot catching the dirty snow and giving one last lunge as my left leg stayed behind and the rest of my silly string guts blanketed the ground. His hands leaving the under of my arms as he dropped me down into the white. He stared down at me, his hands searching his pockets fastidiously, retrieving a wooden pipe from them along with a box of matches. Great now he'd puff a fat long drag of the thing before tossing the lit match on the gas and it'd be good riddance to this entire mess. But he simply dropped the lit match on the ground beside him, stamping it even though it went out the moment it touched the slushy ground around us. What kind of devil cares to not set a forest fire when he's clearly committing a murder, maybe that's just too environmentally unfriendly for a man who drives a prius. Maybe he's just not in it for the arson, but whatever the intent he stood their smoking for what felt like an age.
     "Hoowee. Thought you had me there for a second! There we were paddling along. You in and out of your lil naps, then boom I'm flying off the road with you peppering the inside with your insides. Boy you are quite the fighter." He puffed his pipe and smiled again, this time it wasn't fear that tried to travel its way up my mess, but terror, terror at the realization his plans weren't hardly over, terror in there behind those eyes that told me I would not be sailing along to the end anytime soon, terror in the belief that he would keep me here, keep me struggling, terror knowing that it was true as he bent over bearing tobacco stained fangs down upon my neck.