This piece is about John and his bad morning. Written in more or less than thirty minutes while I listened to random songs while trying to drown out a rerun of The Mentalist.
John stumbled out of his car and into the street. The sky was a light gray, like it had been for the last few weeks. He reached up and felt the wound on his head. How fast had he been going? Who had put that building so close to the corner? He looked up and saw that his Crown Vic was lodged into the shop window of a brick building that was in the dead center of the block.
“Damn, I wasn't even close...” John said to himself. He began to laugh, but a sharp pain in his ribs put an end to that. He did a quick inventory of all the damage he had done. The head wound was bleeding pretty bad, but they always did. His skull felt more or less in one piece. He looked down at his extremities. No obviously broken arms or legs. He wasn't bleeding from anywhere else. But he was sure he had at least broken a rib or two.
The Crown Vic was worse off. The front end was destroyed as it had plowed through the brick store front. The engine was still running, but not with its usual healthy and steady humming. It was making a high pitched whining, and the scent of the car's well lubricated entrails leaking all over the sidewalk was in the air.
He looked into the dangling driver's side mirror, and saw his own face. When he saw the black eye and the large gash across his forehead, he decided that not shaving this morning had been a good call after all.
John put his hand down on the sidewalk to steady himself, and regretted it. He pulled his left hand in front of him, and began to pick the larger pieces of glass out of his palm.
“Safety glass my white Irish ass,” he said. He always knew that was a big scam, or at least he had for the last thirty seconds. But he took a second look at the glass, and noticed the black paper that was glued onto the shards.
“Oh fffffuck.” The bottle. The one damn thing that he really wanted to survive the crash. He looked where he had rested his hand, and saw the neck of the bottle sitting in a puddle of brown and red liquid. The mixture of his blood and the jack was filling in all the cracks in the sidewalk, trying to spread itself across the entire surface of the pavement.
A man called out to John. John looked him over. A short little fat man, more wide than tall. Spouting off in Italian or Greek or hell, maybe even Hebrew. John didn't speak any of those languages. John did not like this man, but he did find his excited gestures and anger amusing. Takes a special something to yell at a bleeding man that just rolled out of a car wreck.
John stood up, after a couple of tries, and brushed himself off. All the while, this old geezer from another country was yelling at him. He really wished he hadn't broken that bottle. John held his hands up to get the fat man to quiet down. After a few more nonsensical words, which John was convinced were curses and insults to his various ancestors, the fat man shut his fat mouth. John reached into his back pocket and whipped out his I.D.
“Relax man,” John said. “I'm with the Health Department.”
Wow! That was both short and terrible! And a wonderful combination of run on sentences and schizophrenic tense changes. Yay! Maybe it'll get better tomorrow!
