Chapter 1
The dashboard glowed a sickly green of 2:17 AM. A talk radio host’s voice buzzed like a trapped fly about the upcoming Super Bowl regarding deflated balls, a tinny nonsense against the roar in my own skull. My '99 Corolla, a grayish-white like old dishwater hummed along the Pennsylvania Turnpike at 68 miles per hour. The headlights were my only faith, carving two trembling tunnels through a blackness so complete it felt solid.
Then the light caught the movement with a violent eruption from the tree line as the woods themselves seemed to convulse. A buck with all muscle and terror launched itself across the asphalt road, its winter coat a deep murky brown with which the moonlight failed to pierce. The buck's antlers were a jagged crown against the sky.
My foot slammed down, a convulsion that locked my knee. The tires screamed in betrayal. The anti-lock brakes juddered like a dying thing under my foot. The car became a living creature I no longer commanded, with its back end fishtailed on a whisper of black ice before the thump arrived with a soft terrible yielding that seemed to swallow all sound and motion at once.
What followed was a silence so vast and hollow it felt sacred, a cathedral of stillness where the only hymns were the delicate tink-tink-tink of the cooling engine, a metallic heartbeat slowing into nothing and the frantic trapped bird flutter of my own pulse beating wildly against my ribs. The cold arrived then, not the outside cold but the one from within. It started in my stomach, a ball of liquid nitrogen that spread. My hands were fossils on the wheel. I finally made myself to look up.
It lay in the red wash of my taillights, a dark heap on the asphalt road. The neck was a snapped twig. I watched, my breath fogging the cracked windshield, waiting for the the final sigh.
The door opened with a crack that shattered the quiet. The February cold air met me like a slap which was so clean it hurt,tinged with the scent of pine and distant diesel and the iron kiss of snow. It was the cold that did not simply chill the skin but seemed to erase the very memory of warmth from the blood and bone.
I stood there as a woman in a cheap coat, leaning against her ruined car on an empty highway. A professional who spent her days drawing out traumas from small quiet faces and all I could think was I have killed a beautiful wild thing. The guilt was immediate,grotesque, and so much simpler than the other guilt I carried.
I walked to the front of the car, the lonely grinding sound of my boots on the grit-covered asphalt which was the only noise in that vast silence, and I saw how the grille was folded into a shattered smile.There dark as old engine oil, the blood was already crystallizing on the hood in delicate branching patterns with a kind of pretty fractal frost that I could only understand as nature’s most obscene and deliberate art.
Back in the driver’s seat, I looked into the rearview possessed by a morbid need for a witness even if the only one I could find was my own ghostly reflecttion swimming in the greenish light, my hair escaping its practical bun and my eyes staring back as two dark hollowed-out holes.
Then I saw her.
There in the backseat, deep in the shadow the dome light could not pardon, was a face that was pale and gaunt framed by raven black hair, and wearing a smile that was far too wide, a rictus of terrible amusement that stretched the skin taut over her sharp bone. Her eyes were widened into pools of madness, the pupils so dilated they swallowed the irises whole, leaving only two black voids that drank the faint light and gave nothing back. She was not looking at the tragedy on the road behind us. She was staring straight ahead, that fixed crazed smile unchanging.Her gaze passing through the headrest and through me before turning behind with the same odd smile as if it was magnetized pinning itself with a terrible and silent knowledge to the hidden weight in the trunk.
The air left my lungs in a rush.
I blinked with the salt tears breaking the vision and found the seat to be empty. Just the crumpled fast-food bag and Amanda’s forgotten hair tie. But the after image remained, seared onto my retinas.
A new coldness bloomed, vaster than winter.
What if this was a sign? What if I wasn’t doing the right thing for Amanda after all?
