Unsuspecting Blessing.

iii

iii

Brian Peterson sat squatted down deep on his haunches, to the point where the heels of his feet hovered above the ground, holding an unconscious, familiar looking girl in his hands. He held her now, in a way that kept her head off of the ground—sitting behind her, with her head propped up on his lap was the option that seemed best—and her hair out of the dirt. Brian thought to himself, on why the ambulance was taking so long, since they were not far from the center of town. He figured that they have a vehicle coming through here most of the time, so of course when he is going to class they are running late.

Also, Brian no longer felt comfortable near the drivers of the beige Saturn; not that he necessarily felt jolly with them beforehand, but at least he had not yelled at the two back then. The driver, however, deserved to be yelled at, screamed at even. He spoke with his friend whether or not he was liable for the accident and if his insurance should pay for it, to which his friend responded with "You are not at fault, you do not need to waste money, it was the car fault." That statement infuriated Brian to no end, because they had not a single concern for the girl with the broken leg, and he wondered if he had not been there, if they would have simply drove off or not called the authorities. They would have been too busy talking about how it was not their fault, Brian thought.

He looked at the face of the girl below him and saw her pale features seemed to have gotten a shade paler, and she now looked like some sort of banshee in the night. Brian put the back of his hand on her forehead and felt the girl's temperature—she was burning hot. He hoped for the ambulance to arrive soon.

The Saturn beside him had thin headlights, and they stared at Brian and the girl drunkenly, and the rust along the front bumped felt unsettling to Brian in a way. The car no longer ran, but he could smell the burning of oil coming off of the thing. He wanted to punch it, to kick it, to hit it with some sort of bat for what it had done, but maybe, he thought, those were his feelings towards the two men still blabbering in their insufferable accents outside the car.

About ten minutes later, and ten more minutes of the dreadful conversationalists, the ambulance arrived, sounding its siren all the way up the street. The girl did not budge, and stayed unconscious still—this worried Brian, but he knew she was not dead, because he felt her soft breathing the entire time she lay on his lap, with the converging and releasing of the tension in her back.

The ambulance parked and an older man and a young woman hopped out of the raised vehicle. The man looked to be around the age of forty or fifty, while the woman with her delicate looking tan skin looked to be more around the age of twenty-five. Without skipping a beat, the duo swung around back and flung open the back doors and pulled out a stretcher; Brian could tell they had much experience with their jobs, but he felt slightly irked at how long it took them to arrive at the scene. They motioned me to move aside from the girl, and they both squatted down, and in unison, picked the girl up head-to-toe and placed her on the stretcher.

When they had gotten her loaded into the vehicle, the man popped his head out from the back, and said, "Are you coming along?" His voice was rough and dry like sandpaper to the ears.

Brian realized the man was speaking to him, so without a verbal response, he jumped up in the back of the ambulance. He did not know why he made such a gesture or a girl he had yet to know the name of, and he knew he would be no help for an accident report because he had not actually seen the accident. But getting in the ambulance alongside her just felt important, it felt right. It also felt pretty cool. The engine started and the stretcher rocked back and forth as the woman drove around the streets and corners of town.

"The police are on their way to speak to those two gentlemen," the man spoke in his parched voice, "but it is part of my job to ask you what happened, so, what happened?"

Brian figured this question would come, but he did not think it would be so soon. He gathered his thoughts, and tried his best to formulate an answer that would benefit the girl the most. "I had passed her on the street," he said, "and as she walked on the opposite side of me, I heard very poor brakes squeal and then a girl screaming, and then a thud."

The man wrote in a tiny notebook he had pulled from an inside pocket on his windbreaker jacket.

Brian noticed as the man looked down at his notebook, the vacancy of hair on the back of the man's head, which was covered by a thousand silver follicles like brush covering a secret cave.

"Go on," the man said, and nodded.

"When I turned around, I saw her—"

"What's her name?" the man interrupted.

"I have no idea." Brian said, ashamedly. "And when I saw her on the ground, I ran over immediately—the men were going on and on about how it was the cars fault and not theirs and—"

"Okay that's all I need," the man stopped Brian right there. His sentences were short and sharp, like he was fed up with the day before it even started.

Brian thought about the accident, thinking maybe there was something more that he could have added to help the girl by a smidge. No, he thought, he told him everything he knew. Then Brian thought about how no cars had passed them the entire time, and the strangeness of that fact considering they were at the heart of town. Maybe he had simply not noticed because of how tied up his brain was, he concluded.

"I do need one more thing." the man said, breaking the unsilent silence, "Check her pockets and find an ID for me."

Brian felt hesitant, and wanted to say no, for he felt that would be violating privacy between him and this familiarly unfamiliar girl, but the man did not ask a question, he gave a demand—and Brian knew that her identity would become important. Brian stood up and felt the motion of the ambulance underneath his feet, swaying his body left to right and back and forth; he could not seem to locate her pockets in all this minuscule motion, and had to slightly lift up her shirt. By doing so, he revealed a handful of cuts and scrapes that had made a bloody impression on the fabric of her clothing. Her abdomen had been bright pale like snow falling in winter time, he could tell, but it was darker and crusted with flakes of dried blood.

Brian finally found the girl's pockets, which one had been completely dry—with no luck finding her wallet, but he found her phone—and the other had been unsettlingly moist with the wallet being covered in blood. The feeling of the girl's blood on his fingers made Brian sick to his stomach, and the stickiness of it between his fingertips made him even more queasy. He handed the wallet to the man, who now had gloves on. Brian felt stupid for not asking for a pair, but also vexed at the fact the man had not offered.

"Well," Brian said, after the man had taken the ID out and jotted down her name, "What is it? Her name?"

The man looked up at Brian, but without moving his head, he only moved his eyes—reminding Brian of that ugly car that 'caused' the accident. "Julia Greenwood," the man said, before putting the ID back in her wallet.

They stopped at the ambulance entrance for the hospital and unloaded. Brian jumped out of the vehicle and immediately felt the stale smell of the hospital invading his nose.

"Are you staying with her?" an unknown voice asked Brian from behind. The voice was pleasant, and soft on his ears. When he turned around, he saw that it was the driver of the ambulance.

"Pardon?" Brian beckoned.

"Are you staying with her, here, at the hospital?" The woman's voice felt like less of a vice grip on Brian than the mans.

He thought about college and about class, but he decided to scratch being late and simply not show up at all since his class ended in twenty minutes. "Yeah, I'll stay." He nodded.