If I had called the Sandström’s, I was sure they would have informed me of the impending weather and advised me not to come. Changing the station, Shadowed Alley’s latest hit song, “Fame Monkey”, was playing. After hearing the first beat of the song I knew so well, I turned off the radio and kept my eyes on the road. There was no way in hell I was letting Shadowed Alley make me run off the road. Especially after they had fucked me over this past week.
With fifteen more miles left to go, and who knew how many more minutes, I started up one of the steepest hills I had ever encountered in my limited driving history. My rental car slipped and slid twice trying to make it up the steep incline, making me wonder if I would be successful in making it up. Once at the top, I felt triumphant in my accomplishment to not only make it up the hill, but without a single curse word flying out of my mouth during the process, even when the brakes did a weird bumpy thing when I hit them while making a strange sound that didn’t sound at all good.
I shouldn’t have celebrated so soon, though, because the moment my car hit the downhill part of my journey, I immediately lost control. I tried everything in my arsenal to get the vehicle back under control, but nothing worked. Every time I pushed the brakes to slow my rapidly increasing speed, the car would veer in one direction and then the other with my overcorrections.
Thankfully, there were no other cars on the road for me to hit or cause me more anxiety. With the luck I’d had the last bit of my life, I should have known what would happen next. For only the briefest of seconds, I thought of how desolate the land was around me and how fortunate I was, so, of course, that was the moment an electrical pole seemed to pop up out of nowhere, just in time for my rental to lose total control, careening into a one-eighty, only for me to right the car into a three-sixty.
After a couple of circles flying down the hill, and me screaming at the top of my lungs, the rental slammed head on into the pole. The sound of the car crunching, the air bags deploying, and glass breaking was deafening. My face was wet with blood from hitting the side window. My neck ached with a throbbing pain that radiated up into a pounding headache, which threatened to overtake me. Spots started to fill my vision as I looked out the shattered windshield where the now icy rain invaded the once warm car. Blackness seeped in slowly, my head rested against the frame of the driver’s side window. Soon, it would be freezing in the car, and I would be coated in ice, but there was nothing I could do about it as the darkness took over.
There was nothing.
Only black.
Cold.
Darkness.