Sydney MacGilvray
It’s a bright and sunny day, and you are a good person. Of this you’re almost certain.
You like to tell yourself stories, don’t you? Stories where scary things happen on dark and stormy nights. Stories where you’re in control. Stories where people who do bad things get punished. Stories where you’re not one of those people.
You’re driving down the road, through one of those bullshit Midwestern states where the same cornfield flashes past your window again and again like a chase scene in an old cartoon. It’s a tiny two-lane highway, nothing to mark it but the violent white centerline scoring it down to the horizon. The sky is so blue it makes your teeth ache. You haven’t seen another car in miles.
One of your favorite stories that you like to tell yourself is the story where you didn’t kill your best friend. Where you’d only had one beer before getting into the car with him. A buddy comedy that didn’t end in a starburst of white light, in a mangle of blue and red sirens, in a funeral scene. A story where you both got to graduate college, a story with no open casket, where- and now you’re losing focus on your damn driving, and the sun is glaring through the windshield and nearly blinding you, and your mood is souring by the minute.
You try to flip on your radio and are greeted with a harsh squeal of static. The Tom & Jerry cornfields speed by as you tighten your grip on the steering wheel. You’re telling yourself a story, you remind yourself. The same story that’s beat through your veins for the past 3 years. You’re going to a conference, and you’re going to do a presentation on company growth, and you’re going to go home, and you aren’t going to think about things you aren’t going to think about. Christ, the sky’s saturated. You thumb off the radio with a harsh click. Are you weaving? You straighten up, blink away the sunshine, focus on the centerline. Cutting straight across until it meets the horizon, clean and decisive, demarcating the world you live in now and the world where your best friend laid peaceful in a shiny brown coffin. He had looked so much neater than in real life – his brown curls slicked back with too much gel, his face choked with foundation. The only thing they couldn’t manage to cover was the thin pink line cutting perfectly down the center of his face. A litany of shattered ribs, bruised organs, but this was his only external injury from what the doctors could tell – one clean incision from his head impacting through the car’s windshield. Tracing forehead to chin, stark as light through a doorframe. A line that slices through your vision even when you close your eyes, but they’re open now, it’s just the centerline, and you’re taking deep breaths the way you’ve practiced, and not remembering the way you’ve practiced, and the radio static is whining as the cornfields whiz by, and that’s when you start to realize that the car is speeding up.
You lighten your touch on the gas pedal. Absolutely nothing. A surreal, floaty nausea starts to take hold of you as your breath quickens. You try removing your foot completely, coasting, braking, slamming your foot down so hard you’re sure you’ll go into a skid and flip over. You swerve the wheel frantically, but it’s as if it’s been completely disconnected from the car. Vinegar begins to pool in your stomach. The cornfields are blurring together, or maybe it’s just your vision. The seatbelt garrotes into your neck. This is a dream, some sick psychological fragment of a past you thought you’d tamped down. That’s the only way this story can make sense.
There are certain things you don’t include when you write yourself a new story. There’s a certain weight you try hard to forget, threads of insignificant knowledge that threaten to suffocate you when the person they belonged to is gone. You knew the way he breathed, the space he took up in a chair, the quiet weight of him sitting next to you.
That’s how you know, without looking, that he’s sitting next to you now.
You don’t want to turn, but the same sick feeling that forced you up to stare into his open casket is driving you on now. It’s almost funny – at the funeral he was too soft, too pretty. Now his face is stretched into a mask of sharp, blank hunger, the vertical scar across his face tugging taut at the edges as his face pulls into a dead, glassy smile. He’s not in his funeral suit anymore but the soft ball cap and sweatshirt he used to wear when he was- and god, you’re back again, any dream of control you once had spiraling away. So much is there that you’ve tried to forget. Everything about him is the same.
But in the parts of the story you erased, you don’t quite remember him having fingers like knives, long and wicked, hooking to a whisper of a point.
The car continues to accelerate, but your seats are frozen into a bubble where he’s just grinning at you and you, you can’t move. He lays his palm against your cheek, and it’s corpse-cold and hard and heavy against your skin. He draws it up, and up, and why aren’t you fucking moving, and you know before you feel it how the blade will hook into your forehead and trace down your nose.
This isn’t real, you know, you think– but you’re having trouble blinking the red out of your eyes and this can’t be happening, it’s not, and your mouth tastes metallic and sour as he splits one lip, then the other, carving a line deep into your chin. He settles back, giving a bland, sick smile, and you begin to be forced back into your seat from the speed. Your face is hot and wet and the wind is screaming through the car, loud as a lobotomy and your thoughts are moving sluggish through your pressed-back brain. When- when did the windshield disappear again? Your vision is blurring to black at the edges. Your head is too heavy to turn but you know, you know he’s still there.
Your last coherent thought isn’t one of fear, or self-preservation, or even of apology. No, your last thought is a selfish one. This isn’t the ending of the story you wanted, you think, and the wind begins to pull at the line at the center of your face. Your skin splits as the wind rushes in, tugging and tearing like an eager puppeteer. It makes you smile so wide that your face is pulled apart, simple as that, a red-stained mask soaring up into the ravenous blue of the sky.
You like to hear stories, don’t you? Stories where scary things happen on bright and sunny days. Stories where people who do bad things get punished. Stories where you’re in control.
Sydney MacGilvray is a second-year from Columbus, Ohio studying theatre and Spanish. She loves storytelling through plays, prose, and song and spending way too many dining dollars on iced drinks.
