End of Shift

It happened just as I was trying to clock out. The numbers teased me by appearing only in my mind and not making their way to my fingers. I couldn't find the correct buttons. Two four, seven...something. That's when it happened. That's when I needed to divert my attention to more pressing matters.
It must not have been real life. There would have been more blood.
Truth is, I was concerned that there wasn't more. The pale yellow bone protruding from her midsection seemed awkward, out of place, as if it had been used as a weapon to kill her. As if it didn't belong to her at all.
She'd been hit by a car, though, and cars don't attack with bones. They tend to maim by brute force of bumper. My theory just didn't pan out.
It was my job to first gather the towels used to apply pressure, and then to hold her slender, limber arms down so that she wouldn't dislodge the bone. I recognized her. She was Holly from Brit Lit. I'd never seen her outside the classroom. I smiled down at her, hoping she'd recognize me as a friendly face.
Alexis--calm, sweet, controlled Alexis--was wigging out. The other girl--the bystander--held towels over the ears. One of them had been ripped halfway off. The bystander moved it into place and then vocalized her fear that our poor victim might remember all this once she was stitched back together. She covered both the ears to minimize her misery. There seemed to be a lot of yelling. After that, there seemed to be a lot of screaming. I wondered if it would help at all.
Off to the side, in the corner of my eye, I could see the bright glow of an odd yellow light.
Not a white light.
Not a tunnel.
Not a life flashing by.
Just golden rays of light peeking through into our world from some other dimension, observing us, judging us, selecting us...

Come See Me

My mother's call left me worried. "Come see me," she'd pleaded. "I miss you." I scribbled down the new address and checked the map. She was fourteen hours away.

Funny, how we do that- measure trips in hours instead of distance, as if we plan to drive straight through, dismissing the sights. 

That's how my father always did it. The shortest distance between two points, and all that nonsense. He was pissed with me when I was twelve years old. I'd pointed out to him that, factoring in the curvature of the earth and the fact that road builders rarely construct straight paths between cities, the shortest distance between two points might actually be an arc. 

He told me to shutthehellup and let him do the driving. 

Maybe that's why my mother divorced him. 

Or maybe not. She told me once that she was tired of playing Caroline to his Charles. I was astonished that she could ever say such a thing, but it rang true. My father had always pictured himself building a cabin, praising God and living off the land. 

My mom, on the other hand, was more of a Hot Lips Houlihand. I never saw her any other way.

She's been calling out to  me for several nights in a row. Sometimes she's still with my father. Sometimes it's my Poppy or James. Sometimes it's a new man altogether. Never mind that she passed away four and a half years ago. That issue never seems to come up when I see her in my dreams. 

I wonder what she's up to that she should need to call out to me so often. It doesn't matter. I can never reach her. There's always a flood or a fire or maybe the roads wear away into impassable rivers of mud and sludge. I get bogged down in the muck. No matter what vehicle I take, car, boat, bicycle, Radio Flyer, I can't seem to remember until I wake up that I know how to fly...