For this week’s PROMPTuesday, describe an experience you have never had but have heard about and can imagine. Describe this experience in the first person singular, present tense as it is happening.
Every word of this is true. Is that cheating? -- Cocktail Maven
I woke this morning with a strong sense of foreboding. Strange dreams last night. At the core, the dreams were completely normal -- going places, doing things, talking to people. What was strange was the fact that every few minutes, right in the middle of a perfectly ordinary conversation with a family member or a shop girl, their faces would flash into an x-ray version. No one seemed to notice but me.
Now, driving north on Interstate 5 through dense, but fast-moving L.A. traffic, I find myself unable to stop thinking about those skeletal faces. Death masks. Meanwhile, in the real world outside my head, yet another panel truck swerves precariously into my lane. You, know, the open-backed ones with the wooden slat rails on the sides and back? They are like a plague on the freeway this morning. Where do they all come from, and why are they picking on me? So far, I’ve been nearly run off the road by a panel truck piled high with swap-meet furniture, rudely (and dangerously) cut-off by a panel truck bearing a lawnmower, two fichus trees and a miscellany of gardening equipment, and now I have to watch out for Swervin’ Mervyn in the next lane. Did I mention that there is a plastic grocery bag plastered to my grille? That little adornment blew there out of yet another panel truck. I can see one translucent, white handle flap annoyingly in my peripheral vision. It’s enough to make a person paranoid.
Swervin’ Mervyn exits, finally, and I breathe a sigh of relief. That is, until the SUV in front of me pulls over a lane. His lane defection reveals just the tiniest candy-apple red sports car between me and, improbably, another panel truck. This one is loaded down with cardboard flats of blackberries. In an apparent attempt to keep the blackberries from escaping during transport, the genius driver has placed three sheets of plywood around the perimeter of the truck bed, one on the left, one on the right, and one in the front behind the cab. Classy, Mr. Berryman.
That sense of foreboding, I woke up with? It’s suddenly worse. It settles like a living creature into the pit of my stomach and reaches a cold hand up to constrict my throat from inside. Every muscle tenses and I am suddenly and painfully conscious of my breathing.
The plywood sheet at the front of the truck is moving.
I watch the plywood vibrate in a quick staccato. Then it is banging, and not gently, on the back of the panel truck’s cab. The freeway backdraft is forcing its way behind and underneath the plywood and shaking, lifting. There is no where for me to go. To either side of me is a solid wall of cars and there is no time to put on my brakes without welcoming the guy behind me straight into my back seat. In these moments, I feel a strange kinship with my fellow drivers. We are all trapped tegether on this freeway, really. Speeding along in unison at over 60 miles per hour. It seems profoundly sad that all those people behind me have no idea their lives depend on whether I time my next actions . . . just . . . right.
As the plywood finally, inevitably, lifts off from its launch pad in the back of the panel truck, the world goes silent, and time ticks forward in frame-by-frame. I watch, horrified and fascinated, as the plywood soars toward me through smog-filled air. It flips in slow motion once, twice. I tap my brakes, quickly, repeatedly, trying to position myself. If I can time this just right, the plywood will land flat in my lane, and I can simply drive over it. I live. Everybody lives. I make it to Tracy's with a good story to tell and we drink wine and laugh. Just as long as I time this just right. I’ve got to time this just right.
The plywood clears the roof of the red sports car ahead of me with barely an inch to spare, still flipping. The damn board seems to have its heart set on me, instead. It wants to lay itself down on the hood of my car, slide up through my windshield, take my head as a souvenir. I won't let it. Surely, it can only have been seconds, but I feel like I’ve been staring down the barrel of this proverbial shotgun for hours. Here it is. Time for the showdown.
I’ve got to time this just right. I’ve got to time this just right. I’ve got . . .
