It Waits

I followed the darkness down the slick black skin of the earth and into the hearth of the city. The highway melded into the darkness of the drenched mud and decaying grass and the only way I could differentiate between the two was by the peeling white line that seemed past its sell by date.

I was comfortable before. Aren’t we all? When I was on the expressway and the beige barriers contrasted quite contemporarily with the golden sun fading behind bruised colored clouds. Color is so indicative. Green grass, chartreuse buds, and buttercups with wide lakes of blue sky. Are those the colors of life? Or is life in the houses I passed? The industry I looked down upon from the freeway as I pass from city to city. Red bricks, burgundy stained glass, magenta sunsets.

The red of the blood that halts in my veins as I snap back to cold, dreary reality. I was over the yellow lines; not by much, but just enough to worry passing cars. I readjust. The road is surprisingly empty. I feel so alone suddenly. The night is too closed off and black, like it’s hiding something the way children’s closets do at bedtime. The wind always picks up at night and the orange lamplights always shift our focus—the night feels like a nightmare where you run in slow motion and your voice is lost to time and head space.

I’m lost in my thoughts again. I’m not thinking. I hate driving at night and yet here I am, pushing 60 into a sable abyss illuminated only by my feeble headlights and my pale form in the windshield. I try to focus again. I turn up the radio and am greeted with eerie static. I twist the dial haphazardly so I can consistently keep two hands on the road. I am greeted with a radio story. A play or something of the sort. I leave it out of convenience but am soon concerned with the plot. A man who can see death. A man who is followed by death.

I’m not superstitious—a factory dyed and marketed rabbit’s foot does not and will not ever hang from my mirror. Yet, I am troubled by the radio story of a man driving away from death, so I turn off the radio and drive in silence.  The dark is closing in on me enough; I don’t need another horrific element to worry about.

I haven’t seen a car for miles, so I switch on my bright lights and momentarily rejoice in the way the ethereal whiteness causes the inky dark to recede. Such a delicate thing, light, yet such a forceful apparition.

I look up and suddenly see the fluorescent red face of death. Two eyes that glower down on the headlights of my car as it collides and I lurch forward into deaths greedy fingers.

Death never follows, it waits.