Las Penas

The cement truck hit the taxi sideways. The worst damage was to the back door right where Rachel was sitting. The screech of protesting tires, the impact thud, and the groan of bending metal as the taxi was shoved across the intersection, was followed by a hush, only broken by the whisper of slurry as the drum of the cement mixer rotated on its axis. As the dust settled, a chatter of excited voices approached the wreck. She heard the wail of an ambulance in the distance. "Somebody must have been hurt," she thought. The cab hadn't rolled over so she was still sitting upright, but when she tried to move, she couldn't. Her seatbelt was so tight she could hardly breathe, and one leg was held fast by a corner of the front seat that had come off its rail and been shoved into her lower leg. When she twisted her foot to get it free, a shock of deep pain shot from her leg to her heart, and for the first time, she cried out. Eventually the firemen cut her seatbelt and freed her trembling black-stockinged leg, but by then she was exhausted from gritting her teeth and shouting in agony. As they lifted her onto the stretcher, she felt rain on her face. "Just my luck" she thought, but then remembered it had been raining when she left home, which was why she had taken a cab instead of walking to the restaurant. Living near the centre of the city gave her the benefit of walking to work, but that afternoon she was on the way to a friend's birthday party on the waterfront. There were steep hills to navigate and at that time of year, the sidewalks were drifted over with orange and yellow leaves on top of a soggy undercoat that made for treacherous walking in high heels. She would look great arriving at the party with the back of her pink skirt a mess of muddy leaves. Now it didn't matter.

The wet road might have been the cause of the accident but if the police asked her about the dynamics of the crash she wouldn't be able to tell them much because she had been checking her phone at the time. Suddenly remembering the phone, she sat up on the stretcher and saw the smashed taxi. It was amazing she had come out of it in one piece. She was about to call out to the firemen who surrounded the mangled wreck, to look out for her phone before they stepped on it, but she was knocked back by a sharp pain in her belly, below where the seatbelt had squeezed her ribs. "The baby," she said. It was no surprise he was having a reaction to the crash because he'd been rattled around like jelly beans in a jar.

"What is it?" the ambulance attendant stroked her forehead.

She thought she said the word 'baby' again but it was difficult to hear over the shouts of firemen and traffic police. Nobody reacted. "Pregnant," she said, but it was an odd word that took her back to adolescence, and was more complicated than it should have been. The attendant stared at her with concern but no comprehension. She was having one of those dreams where nobody is listening so the dreamer shouts louder to wake himself up.

The attendant pushed up one of her eyelids. "She's shocking," he said.

"The baby," she tried again and pressed a hand to each side of her abdomen. She wasn't alarmed. After the stress of being extracted from the taxi, she was as calm as if telling a hairdresser how she had broken a fingernail. Her lack of concern for the baby was because she was still of two minds about carrying him to term. She wasn't ready to look after a child, but she was already halfway through her pregnancy and the clock was running out on when she could have an abortion. The dilemma might have now been resolved without having to make an impossible decision. The baby would make it or he wouldn't, the future was out of her hands.

The ambulance attendant's eyes widened as he lifted the sheet from her legs and focused on her pelvis. She was wearing black stockings and a salmon coloured mini-skirt. She felt an attendant cut away what was left of the stocking on her lower leg and hoped someone would rescue her heels because they were Prada and expensive.

"We've got a problem," the attendant said to his colleague. "How many weeks along?" He turned to her.

"Twenty," she said, knowing exactly from which day to count.