Ink Drawing: Phasing by J L Carey Jr

Phasing

She still couldn’t shake the previous night’s dream. It was recurring and had been for years, the sweat ridden nightmare of her in the car driving that day, yesterday, last year; moving through moments of non-being. Any day easily inserted in another’s place. Her long drive home riddled with lost time and familiar cars, each vying for the open spaces that take us nowhere.

The radio tuned to her subconscious, Charity Neebe of NPR announcing endless dot orgs she’ll never recall. Each broadcast bleeding into the next. She moves instinctively in her woken dream state until the semi truck swerves.

There is a focusing involved as if the mind has turned the camera on and pressed record. The semi clips the concrete viaduct and barrels into the red S-10. The two vessels scream along the median wall until the semi swerves away. Crimped, the pickup veers back into traffic and is struck again by the semi.

The T-Boned strike thrusts the tiny truck into the air in some surreal aerial fit; its passenger side tire abandoning its post. A shimmer of light is thrown from the windshield signaling each rotation like a second hand. It counts three before gravity regains its monarchal reign over the mass and brings it down upon the cab of the semi. The driver is crushed as the S-10 rolls off end over end, jettisoning its contents as it goes. The world seems to stop for a moment, take in a breath, process what has happened.

The man crawls out the back window of his pickup and the world exhales. The traffic lurches around the scene. There is some shifting, they accelerate into non-being again as the billboards blur McDonalds this exit, McDonalds this exit. She realizes she is lost within the negative spaces of time and then she’s home in her bed again, setting her alarm, turning out the light and driving away.