The car hits me. Or rather, my bike. It�s launched into the air and I land on the tarmac, thankfully in the next lane. The Kia continues to move, dragging my bike by its fender, for about a half-mile down the straight road, and by the time she stops I�ve already struggled to my feet. My legs hurt.
Instead of turning around and driving back, the woman runs out of her car and sprints the half-mile towards me, slowing changing from a stick figure in the distance to a well-dressed woman in a black suit who charges towards me with honest care in wide eyes. Her hair is all over the place.
�Oh my god!�
I wince and adjust my leg muscles, but (not being a proper biker), I have no idea which muscles or bones were affected. I�ve seen this particular leg-adjustment move on TV and figured now would be a good time to break it out.
�Are you hurt?�
I examine this question in my head. Relative to other automobile accidents, claiming to be hurt would be like calling Steven King a vegetable. He�s not�quite�there, but that little bit that he can do makes a difference.
She offers me her cell phone. I have no idea why I take it, because she clearly needs to be arrested, but I also feel a little bad for her. She didn�t really mean to hit me, and I wasn�t paying much attention.
�I have to get to this altar guild meeting, and it�s, well, it�s now, and I�m a bit late and I see you can walk, here you can use this to call a taxi, here�s some money, here you go.�
And she just showers me with money and scrambles back to her car. It�s the funniest thing I�ve seen in a long time, but then my leg sends a stab on pain to my eyeballs and I have a little spasm there, on the ground. I�m sure it would be hilarious from ten feet away, my leg jerking and me trying to grab hold of it so it stops moving. I�m sure.
I manage to limp to the nearest open field, where I think some of the Spanish guys play soccer. It�s barren today; I wonder why. I don�t particularly want to look down at my leg to see the damage, but I don�t think I need convincing that it�s been affected by the accident.
I can feel those words prepare themselves to leave my mouth more often, as when elderly women ask why I limp. �The accident� will become the two words that solve a problem and recall an incident of screeching tires and blacktop. I can taste the ramifications like grit under my tongue, in my teeth. A constant reminder.
The field presents a goose-poop ridden obstacle, and I can�t even let myself collapse into it. I have a problem with feces. So I straggle over to the clearest-looking area, over by the front of that old wire factory. Even though it�s always there, I�ve always thought of it as burned-down. People don�t talk about it much, and I think someone told me once, at a young age, that it had caught fire and I never let go of the concept. Silly how our brains work.
And then I see the door propped open, but more importantly: I hear something. I hear a noise that will always and forever be Nina screaming. She�s not screaming words, but I know the meaning. She wants to be saved, and I am going to save her.
I burst through the door and there is a strange man (black, though that�s become such a clich�. Young angry black man and poor screaming white woman�I�d much rather he be something, anything else. Asian, or white, or Samoan�I have no preference. Just not this tired old game.) standing at the other end of this factory. It�s dark and unpleasant, dust making everything a dim gray. It�s too dark to see much of anything, but this man is such a dark color that his teeth and eyes look radioactive, a beacon at the end of the badly lit aisle. Except, considering Nina, he is exactly the opposite of a beacon.
It�s like a bad 30�s movie, with the mustachioed immigrant tying the poor, virtuous blond to the train tracks. She screams loudly and amusingly, and then the hero saves her. We are a bad 30�s movie.
Except that I am bleeding from the leg and something like bone is poking through the thigh of my jeans.