Fatal Attractions

Chapter One: Dark Water

Juliet zoomed beside the coast through heavy fog. Her pale skin gleamed beneath the moon. All four windows were cranked down, allowing wind to rush inside her car. The sound of the ocean waking up next to her, lonely but sure, urged her on in her reckless joy ride.

Daredevil driving suited her. Trapped in an air-deprived box, unable to smell or feel the world outside, as most people drove, was enough to make her go insane. Juliet wanted to swallow the world whole. When she drove fast enough her fingertips would brush over the sensation, teasing her, and she'd feel a seed of excitement sprout inside the pit of her stomach, but she could never latch on to the feeling.

Freedom always escaped.

The headlights on her car strained to break through the wall of morning fog that pummeled against her car. To Juliet's right, the usual blue-and-green world ceased to exist, instead stretching out into an infinite ocean of gray.

Hurtling through roads that curled within inches of a cliff's brink would be considered suicidal to many, but not Juliet. Throughout her entire life, the emotion of fear had evaded her. She could stare at death's misshapen face and not break a sweat. Her amygdala, which was the part of the brain that created fear, hadn't developed when she was a baby. She was literally fearless. The doctors called her a medical marvel, but in society's eyes, she was a freak. Her condition made her crave bad situations. She wanted to be caught in the rain and she wanted to fall. Hurricanes and broken-down cars were adored because they made her feel, and that mattered.

Something was coming her way through the fog. A truck rushed towards her in mystique waves. The truck driver's headlights were snapped off and forgotten. Juliet had always thought about how horrible that job must be. The countless days spent away from your family, the aches in their feet from being glued to the accelerator for hours at a time. From the way he drove, she could tell he had been driving for hours.

In fact, he had been behind the wheel for five hours, and he needed to pee. Bad. His truck scurried through the roads like a starved mouse through a maze for cheese. Unfortunately, for the last hour, every time the truck driver rounded a corner he was met with the same foggy view. There was nothing along the road. His eyes found a half-empty bottle of Gatorade. A light bulb mushroomed atop his head. The neon blue liquid was chugged, his pants unzipped. He took his eyes off the road to situate the bottle.

By the time Juliet had the thought to try and avoid the truck it was too late. It teetered out of its lane ominously, headed straight for her. She honked the horn, once, twice. The trucker behind the wheel looked up from his task in confusion.

"HOLY SH-" he began, seeing his truck speeding towards her small car, but before he could finish the sentence the Gatorade bottle flew out of his hand, and a surge of pale liquid splashed through the truck. Streaks of pee blurred his windshield and squashed his vision.

He cut his wheel sharply to the right so fast that the back of his truck skidded into Juliet's lane. The truck's reptilian body nearly blocked the entire road. Only the smallest strip of pavement, lying adjacent to the cliff, was open. Time was running out, and if Juliet didn't do something, they would crash. Juliet swerved at the last second, cutting out towards the cliff with the scream of burning rubber surging after her. SSH BOOF! CRACK! In a single gliding motion, the truck whizzed by, whipping Juliet's right mirror off her car. Glass burst like fireworks during a glorious finale.

Beep! Beep! In the far distance, Juliet heard his horn blare, sending her the lovely message of "go fuck yourself." She scowled. It had been his fault. If she hadn't swerved when she had, she would have been swiped off the cliff, sentenced to endure a slow, watery death.

Aimlessly, Juliet leaned out the window and raised a middle finger.

"Fuck you too!" she screeched, though there was no way he could hear it, or see her through the fog. He was long gone. Juliet lowered herself back into the driver's seat and cursed. In her distraction, a curve in the road had snuck up on her. She did not spin her wheel in time, and her car bumped off the asphalt onto rocky ground, pointed towards the forty-foot cliff drop. It felt wrong, as if she had woken to a purple sky, asked her father what the hell had happened, and his response had been; "sweetie, the skies always been purple."