. . . I’m Tired Of The Deadly Car Crashes
HONORABLE MENTION, Winter 2025
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY H. WHEATON
It was through an app, like most things nowadays. We had similar tastes, she lived close, it was a good fit. The drive there was fine. Normal. Unremarkable. I’d had thousands of drives like it before.
It was a good date, my first in a while. She had a wide smile and an easy laugh. We talked about movies and music and our jobs, and at the end set a time for a second date the next Wednesday.
The drive back was normal, for a bit. Then, on the roundabout below the highway, I saw a Toyota sedan smashed perpendicular into the traffic barrier. Cars had slowed and stopped around it. I drove around and continued on my way, a little perturbed but not enough to dull my good mood.
That next Wednesday, as I was driving back from work to get ready for our date, it was a rolled Honda minivan on the side of the highway.
Halfway through the second date I’d already put it out of my mind. It was an enchanting night. She shared a long-winded but consistently amusing anecdote about her mother, and I laughed at the points where it was appropriate to laugh, and we were both beaming by the end of the meal and agreed to rendezvous back at her apartment. We had driven separately, so we parted briefly. I left a little later than she did after spending a few minutes checking myself in the car mirror and making sure my breath didn’t smell of the scallops I had dined on.
At the intersection a block from her house a red Mazda blasted through a red straight into the side of a cop car. The hood crumpled. Metal tore like paper.
When I finally arrived she was waiting for me, beckoning me toward her bedroom, and I said I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but I just saw a man die and I started choking up a little and she fetched some tissues and we agreed to go out the next Friday for bar trivia.
Over the next week I was hyper vigilant whenever I got in the car, eyes wide, teeth gritted, white-knuckle grip on the wheel. There was no incident. That Friday we met at the bar for trivia. I didn’t order anything alcoholic and neither did she, which I appreciated. We lost big in the competition but it was a fun night, a few awkward silences doing little to dull the chemistry.
That night we made love in her apartment.
I woke up refreshed, energized, the weight of the past two weeks finally lifting from my shoulders, our next rendezvous scheduled for the coming Sunday at my place—and on the drive home I saw a runaway tractor trailer decimate a lane of oncoming traffic. I got out of the car and just started vomiting, eyes locked to the ground, the pile of sick, the awful crackle of the oil fire, and the screaming getting farther and farther away as my vision tunneled.
When she arrived at my place on Sunday I was a wreck. There were empty bottles on the counter, there was dirty laundry on the floor and unwashed dishes in the sink, but she paid them no notice, breezing past them without so much as a comment to look straight into my sunken eyes and ask how my week had been. I said I don’t think God wants us to be together and for some reason she found this hilarious and was so busy laughing she didn’t even turn to look as across the street a school bus plowed through the front of a busy coffee shop and the light from the spreading flames danced across the side of her face. She spent the night. I didn’t sleep. That morning, right before sunrise, I quietly got out of bed, grabbed the keys off the counter, and made a break for the interstate. Now, as the sun crests the horizon I am speeding down it, faster than I’ve ever driven, faster than this car should be able to go, and to each side of me cars begin to collide and erupt into flame and roll off the road and plow into the dividing wall and all I can see is blood and fuel and metal and fire until the sun beams directly into my eyes and I don’t see anything.
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