The streetlights are checkmarks on some invisible list; I pass them and then forget them, they're done until the next one. The mist is thick enough for me to need my wiper blades, but I don't use them. Not yet. I haven't looked in my rearview mirror for miles, hours, ever. The streets are deserted, wet and cold.
There's someone in the back seat of my car. I know, because I can smell her. I can smell the scent she carries, heavier now, like I've buried my face in it. I know because she has her hands in my shoulder, sinking her fingers through my flesh and muscle, touching the bones. She hides in the corner of my eye, where my vision blurs and distorts, she flickers into and out of sight at the corner of my rearview mirror. She is there, with her hands deep inside my shoulders now, wrist deep, I'm sure of it. She grabs bone, wrapping her fingers tightly around the solid structure and pulls herself through the seat and into me, her front pushing through the skin of my back, until she wears me like a suit. I can't feel anything except the cold, as she wraps herself up in me, warming while I freeze. She places her hand, my hand, at the top of the steering wheel, and jams the accelerator down with my foot.
The streetlights check off rapidly, seconds between them, screaming engine and screaming driver until she pulls her hand, my hand, down sharply to the right, and we hop the curb, slamming into a telephone pole between two streetlights, one item crossed off my list, one still waiting patiently. The telephone pole cracks, splinters breaking slowly at first, then rapidly until with a groan of human suffering, the pole shears off at the point of impact and lands solidly on top of my hood. The electric wires dance on the ground around the car, blue fire angrily jumping from puddle to puddle. My airbag slammed me back into my seat, even as my seatbelt cut into me cruelly. I sat, in a daze, long enough to realize that there was no one in the back seat of my car, not now. But she was there, I felt her hands, and I smelled her, just now. Lights flashed on in the houses around me, and soon, I was discovered, my car intimately wrapped around the broken stump of a telephone pole, the shattered remains lying spent across the car.
Sirens filled the night slowly then, even as I faded into a blissful unconsciousness, what I thought would be death, most certainly. I had a dream, an exaggeration of reality. We were on a wooded trail, older than time. Pine needles, the length and color of toothpicks, blanketed the ground while the healthy green of the trees around told stories of years of life. I wasn't alone, riding along as I was then. She sat behind me, arms tight to the metal rack, hands on the inside bars. The road was longer in my dream, and stretched to forever, I was sure. She said she was home, here, and I believed her. I don't know why I dreamt of her. I still don't know certainly that I did. Hospital rooms are too sterile, even for their own necessity. The woman, hands locked around my spine and bone and muscle, was still there, quietly sleeping, when I woke up. I had flowers around me, numerous enough for a funeral; colorful though, not at all mournful.
I glanced over myself, noting the requisite number of arms and legs, toes, fingers, counted happily two, two, ten, and ten. I felt no bandages on my face, no pain besides a dull ache in my ribs, and the embracing woman around my bones. I moved, and she stirred in an angry tormented way, though I did not cease nor try to mask my movements. Like a cat unsheathing claws, she dug her nails into my bones, and forced me to move slowly and quietly. I shuddered from the chill inside, and from the open back of the robe I wore. I felt tightly wrapped bandages around my chest, ribs and the upper portion of my stomach. I began to stretch while sitting sideways on the bed, and felt then the first twinges of real pain, from under the bandages. I had not yet taken stock of my injuries when I was interrupted in my self-examination. The doctor seemed happy that I was awake, though brisk in the examination.
I answered his questions, one by one, all negatively. No drugs. No drinking. Hadn't been tired or dizzy. Could not recall the details of the accident, only driving then waking up injured. That I could clearly remember every moment of the invasion of this woman, and the accident that followed, were facts I kept hidden. She relaxed, I could feel her hands gently holding on inside me now, not at all roughly as she had when I'd first tried to get up. Broken ribs, three of them. One was likely due to the airbag deploying too late after impact, when I was closer to the steering wheel than I should have been. I was assured that I could have been a lot worse. I stood up with a little pain, and to my surprise, a little assistance from her. My broken ribs creaked, I'm sure of it, though not roughly enough to make me sit back down. Standing was tiring, I could feel the weight of this woman attached to my bones, hanging from my internal organs and joints like an aging Christmas wreath. I soon had to lay down again, or risk falling. Her weight was crushing, though it was certainly much less than mine.
The way she had turned and twisted herself into me made it difficult to do anything. I could see her, in my mind's eye, curled up and spiraling around inside of me, her arms and legs freakishly thin and long, like strands of nearly invisible wire, so tightly bound in a coil around me, to appear to be solid armor plating over my bones. But heavy. Immeasurably heavy. I healed, the bones knitted as they do in all people, twisted and took root in themselves again, stronger at the break when they were done healing than they were before the injury. Better than new, the doctors told me, as I healed. Sometimes, she'd rest her mouth and nose against the inside of my neck, and I could feel her breathe inside me, her rhythmic rise and fall of her lungs, pressure on my lungs, tightly holding on when I'd move, painfully sometimes when I'd move quickly. I could not remove her, even if she was tangible, solid. But she was real... she is real, wrapped like ivy around an oak tree, branch for branch being tightly wrapped, held together and slowly dying at the same time, by someone in my back seat.