Tick Tock [short story]

the day sh[e] died

Monday, August 5th, XXXX ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀02:19

United States of America

NXX XXXX

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The sun was out when Kassie died. The sky never weeps when a person passes away, like it does in the movies because half the audience is too stupid to understand that something bad or sad is about to happen without the visual cue.

But in reality, hundreds, maybe thousands or millions of bad things happen each day. Just watch the news. Every day, someone is hurting someone else using some sort of weapon or someone has stolen something from a generally rich someone or a fire has killed nineteen dutiful firefighters, and one of them had an expecting wife and the others had families or loved ones waiting for them to come back. But they never did.

Yet, when all these things are happening, the sky still doesn’t weep. 

And so, it didn’t weep for Kassie either.

The sun was blue and clear and calm and looking down at everything that happened with it’s passive, unclouded face. We were crossing an intersection. It was just the two of us. I was walking toward her left, since that was where the cars were, and she was eleven, and I needed to shield her or protect her, or do something sisterly, being two years her senior.

A car came barreling from the right side of the road. They were making a right turn. And they hit Kassie. I was knocked back a few feet into another car. I remember the burning of the metal as it hit my skin. It was 90 degrees out, humid, and it was noon. The sun was rising, and there was blood and wind rushing through my ears.

There might have been actual blood on my face too. I don’t remember.

It wasn’t much compared to what was right in front of me. Kassie’s blood was all over the asphalt. Red against black. It was spilling onto those stupid yellow and white lines too.

Someone must have dialed 911. It wasn’t me. But I was notified by someone that the paramedics were coming, an ambulance was coming and did I have my parents’ number and could I give them the number so they could explain the situation.

I don’t remember. It was a blur. But I must have given up the numbers. My parents were at the scene in record time. I used to wonder how many speed limits they’d ignored and how many red lights they’d gone right through just to get there.

Now, I just wonder what they were thinking when they saw me. It weighs on my mind what they might have thought when they saw me alive instead of Kassie. Because I know that even though they certainly didn’t want me dead, they had expected me to be. After all, I was supposed to protect Kassie. I was supposed to do that heroic thing where I see the car coming and I shove Kassie out of the way and because it’s too late, I can only stand there and wait the mere seconds before the car slams into me and ends my life.

I wish it had been that way.

Then, I wouldn’t be thinking to myself, right now, in the dead of the night, about how I had seen a flash that day, out of the corner of my eye. A blue flash. A blue that was like cerulean. A cerulean sedan. The sedan that hit Kassie. The sedan that should have hit me. 

The sedan that wouldn’t have hit anyone if only I’d noticed and recorded and had told myself and Kassie to wait another light for that rushing car to rush past the crosswalk, leaving us safe.