After an Accident

After an Accident:

Rationed Breaths on a Dirt Road

The woman walking to the mailbox saw her, just a hundred yards from the field, movement beyond the flying dust.

GPS fails on dirt roads. In the desert, it takes drivers over cliffs or down mule paths. In Mattoon it leaves trucks on narrow bridges for a double tow. Near Westfield it leads to a dead end after a high gravel strip beside a creek.

She had tea in Greenfield but can’t remember the sandwich. She hopes it was egg salad, not the usual garden burger. The waiter was tall, polite, and convincing, so she walked to the twice as nice shop across the street to try on jackets and a lamp store for a specialty shade. She saw a sign for a museum on the way home.

Semis block signs on the freeway.

When she found her phone on the dashboard, she wanted to call her friend, but she had no idea where to tell him to pick her up. The walk up the dirt road was easy. Dust covered her shoes and pants, gray flour on black. The mailbox woman gave directions for her friend and the red-haired cop.

State troopers wear strapped hats under square chins. Sitting in a front seat, she sees how much more they write than shoot. Sure, they carry a gun, but they also fill out forms and send reports through secure sites, long narratives more like the blog a friend kept when she trained for her first marathon. Runner Babe, she called it, stories without a center, the tales told to a square chinned trooper between painful breaths.

She called her handyman next, canceling the bamboo flooring in her living room and hallway. Her carpet was dented, a brown lawn like the pasture she hit when she braked on gravel, less flat than it looked, as if hiding rocks too dry for mold.

Side curtain airbags look like open Japanese lanterns, whiting crumpled blinds that block the shattering. The seatbelt saved her, but the airbag stopped all but a few flecks of glass.

The nurse said it was the worst fracture she’d seen.

 Slow breath.

 After gravel