It was night, and we had been arguing about something stupid – I don’t remember what anymore. Arguing wasn’t something we did often, and neither of us was very good at the few moments afterward. I reached over and placed my hand on hers. She squeezed my fingers. Apology accepted.
Elizabeth. I looked at her sitting there with her smug little smile and I felt blood rush to my face. It made me feel warm to look at her and I loved it. We hadn’t been dating long, and it was scary how much I was into her. She made me think these awful, gushy thoughts that I never thought would find themselves in my mind. I thought I was sane. But now she had taught me something that connected me to so many other men in history. This is what men fight for. This is why men write and sing. This was why men spend, travel and just… lose their minds. To make something like this all their own. I thought things like this, and I said things like this, and I wrote things like this, and I knew they were simply inexcusable - worse than the worst bad poetry - I just didn't care. I was in the kind of love that made everyone around me want to puke, and I was all the better for it. And to think that she felt the same way about me just made no sense.
We were in our own little world and nobody could touch us.
You may remember that kind of love.
I don't know what we hit in the road just then, if we hit anything, but my front left tire blew out. It just blew. There we were on the interstate going seventy-five miles an hour and this thing doesn't just go flat, it blows the fuck out.
I couldn’t steer for anything. I felt the left side of the car drop a few inches up front and heard the whump whump whump of the tire for just a moment before it completely shredded and came off. We were in the left lane, and between two of those concrete barriers in a construction zone. Everything started moving in slow motion. Elizabeth was screaming beside me. When the tire came off, the rim dug into the newly paved asphalt below us and jerked the car violently to the left. Our front end slammed into the barricade and the back end spun out behind me so I was staring straight at the barrier now in front of me. I looked to my left and saw a white minivan barreling towards us. It swerved to its right and took the back of our car right off, spinning us 180 degrees in the road and leaving us there, perpendicular to oncoming traffic. The impact whipped my head into the window and busted it out. I remember hearing the glass break but not feeling the smack. There was warm wetness on the side of my head and face. I couldn't see well at first. Everything sounded muffled and she was shaking me and saying something I couldn't hear or couldn't understand. She had tears in her eyes. Everything was still happening so slowly. I looked to my left and saw the minivan and the back of our car crumpled together ahead in the road. Looking back on it now, I figure maybe five seconds had passed since the tire blew.
Dull in my ears, I heard the sound of screeching tires again. I looked back to my right and behind Elizabeth's tear streaked face I saw the chrome grill of a truck – big, and black, and coming too fast. My eyes widened and I tried to yell but nothing came out. She had just started to turn her head to follow my gaze when I saw the glass behind her explode. Even over the screaming tires I could hear the pieces singing through the air around us. The headlights of the truck lit them from behind and gave her a halo made of a million tiny stars. I remember that moment. And I remember that I couldn't help but think she looked beautiful.
...
Now I hold her hand, and she sleeps softly beside me. Monitors beep and machines hiss around us under the fluorescent hospital lights. She is still beautiful and I wish that I could give her a kiss and wake her up like in the fairy tales. But this is real life and besides, I've already tried a hundred times.
It's been almost three weeks since I woke up in a bed like the one she lays in now and my mother cried over me. They told me I'd been asleep for nine days. Lizzy got the worst of it. The truck hit her side. But she is alive and stable and they tell me that's a miracle in itself. They say she could wake up tomorrow or not at all.
I can't be here all the time. I've got class and other stuff, but I am here otherwise. It hurts to leave, because I don’t know what might happen while I’m gone, and good or bad, I want to be here for it. I think maybe I need to be here for it.
As I look at her, she is still beautiful, and she is still all mine. I place my hand on hers and leave it there. I close my eyes, and I wait for a squeeze. I will wait for as long as I have to.
- Short Story by David Sloan
