by Ed Hurst
“hello” questioningly twice.
“Honey, where are you? Are you alright?”
He started shaking again, weeping. For the second time in a single hour, the whole universe shifted. “I’m sorry!” he bawled. He said it again a couple of times. The voice on the other end asked again, “Honey, are you alright? I waited an hour for you at the cafe but never saw you. Did we miss each other somehow?” He could only answer by bawling pitifully, heaving sobs, nearly dropping the little phone.
“Honey, what happened? Where are you? Please talk to me!”
He bleated out, “I don’t know where I am! I don’t know what happened. I’m sorry! Please tell me what I did wrong! I’ll do anything you want.”
“Oh, Honey... You haven’t done anything wrong! There’s just some sort of mistake. Can you tell me where you are?”
He didn’t have to look around to know -- “No. I’m in a parking lot of some old store that’s empty.” The question distracted him a bit from his misery.
“Okay, don’t hang up, Honey. I’m going on the other line for a minute. I’ll be right back. Promise you’ll hang on?”
“Yeah,” he whispered. He was coming back from the depths. The mad universe was becoming more shadowy, less hard-edged. Now he dared look up and see if anything in his line of sight looked familiar. No, not yet. Maybe when his head cleared a little bit more.
True to her promise, Elise spoke soothingly again. “Hon, I want you to just rest. Stay there where you are for now, if you can. I’ll be right there with some help. You just relax, okay?”
He couldn’t say how long he waited. The breeze played with the locks of his curly hair, and he sat face in hands, elbows resting on knees. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, but he never heard what there was, anyway. That is, until a couple of vehicles crunched on the gravel near him. He waited to move until he heard the voice of Elise. She was instantly bending over him, holding his face between her hands. He wept anew, half in renewed sorrow and half in joy that she was here now, touching him, treating him as she always had before when he got hurt. The terror was the last to go, and it edged back reluctantly. He had no idea what she was saying, until she repeated for the third time: “Are you alright?”
He knew she meant was he still there, inside the battered and bruised body. His polo shirt was still a mess, and the coffee stain on his back stood out faintly dark against the stripes of blue, yellow and red. There was someone else there, and they were helping him stand. She took his helmet and keys, just as a third vehicle pulled into the empty lot, that of his cousin who lived a few blocks from their house. He brought his pickup, obviously to haul away the bike, as he had graciously done a couple of times before when it broke down.
Slowly the light in his head came on, and he realized the other person helping him was an EMT. A police officer sat in a cruiser a few yards away, speaking into a radio handset. It made all the difference in the world when Elise insisted on riding with him. As the large medical van began to move, he was thankful beyond words the disaster was past.
A few days later, she was listening when he told the doctor what he believed happened to him that day. While the whole incident suddenly made sense of a sort, it nearly killed her to think he believed she would do that to him. They told her initial tests indicated a small growth in his brain which they expected could be removed relatively easily. As she wept that night alone in bed, she prayed fervently God would not prolong his recovery period.
Pinch Me
She had so much to give and not a clue where to put it.
Setting: Current time, somewhere in the US Heartland.
1
He stood off to one side, hidden behind a side curtain on the stage. There in the center, the woman spun around, fringes and silky sleeves fluttering. The band behind played a very engaging beat, but the song was nonsensical. The lyrics were schizophrenic, like two distinctly different conversations woven together in a confusing mess. It was hard to tell which phrase went with which conversation, one moment demanding someone back off and in the next, begging to be taken somewhere. Yet the song remained a major hit for its melody and dramatic, if confusing, imagery and the singer’s singular beauty.
He shook his head as a statement of dismissal. Much as he loved the music, the song meant nothing. Still, the act of shaking his head became the impetus for clawing his way back slowly to waking awareness. It was a dream. As full consciousness came to him, he realized why that dream had haunted his final hours of sleep that morning. All those years in his youth, he had fantasized about that singer. Her sultry voice was one thing, but the steady supply of highly enhanced photos and videos of her face burned a hole in his desire, forever out of reach.
But here and now, the very real face resting in the crook of his arm was so very like the legendary singer. He reached out and touched the flowing, wavy blond hair, which he knew fell down nearly to her waist. The small turned up nose stood above full, pouty lips, in the middle of her nearly flawless skin, save for the faint scar across one cheek from long, long ago. The rosy hue of her face never seemed to fade, and even in sleep her eyes under the high arched brows seemed large and round.
As those eyes opened to reveal pools of blue deeper than any ocean, a smile played slowly across her lips. She reached for him with her free hand and they embraced in a warm kiss. As he held her close for at least the hundredth time, he never quite escaped the overwhelming sense no man’s life could ever match this moment, nor all the other moments like it. What she was to him as a woman was greater by far than her mere physical beauty. No fantasy could match this. Nor could any fiction hope to match the real story of how he found this creature...
2
The storm hit during the late night hours, and had left horrific damage. The company has asked him to inspect the damage at some clients’ sites as soon as he could get through that next morning. He borrowed his neighbor’s old motocross hunting bike and was forced more than once to take full advantage of its capabilities. That and the small chainsaw he carried. He managed to stay on the main highway.
But nothing could prepare him for how his plans that day were forced in unexpected directions. At one side road he slowed to glance down through a mass of old growth trees, some of which had fallen against each other in a vast interlocking mess that was shocking to see. As he turned to move on, something caught his attention from the corner of his eye. Under one massive tree lying across the road he glimpsed the glint of a red painted surface. Turning the bike down the road, he dodged some of the debris and got as close as he could.
Sure enough, there was a vehicle of some kind crushed under a particularly large sycamore. After discovering there was simply no getting around it easily, he found he could clamber up from the base of the trunk to about where the crushed metal was visible from above. His arthritic joints reminded him he was too old for this, but there might be some small chance someone was alive.
The vehicle had been facing out toward the main road, and the front was nearly obliterated, but the rear stuck out partially intact. His attempt to find footing to climb down the back side of the car caused things to shift just enough to notice. He froze. A tingle ran down his whole body when he realized he heard a faint raspy voice call out.
“Is anybody there? Help!”
With renewed vigor he struggled and almost fell onto the back window glass, coming to rest on the trunk lid. He bumped his fist against the glass, shouting, “Hello!”
The inside of the glass was fogged up. That was no surprise, as the summer sun was already turning the moisture from last night’s rain into a very muggy morning. A hand feebly wiped away some of the fog, and he caught a glimpse of wheat colored hair, with a renewed appeal for help which carried a distinctly feminine sound.
Looking around quickly, he realized, aside from trees and mud, there was nothing he could use. Leaning back into the glass, he yelled. “Hang on! I’m going to get something to break this glass and get you out. I’m not leaving you!” He scrambled back u
p over the limbs and crushed front end of the car, ignoring his sore joints, taking risks in jumping around like a teenage boy. Grabbing the chainsaw off the motorbike, he started it up even as he ran back toward the mess.
It took forever, yet it was only seconds before he had carved a path alongside the twisted metal which allowed him to duck under the bulk of the tree. The last limb he cut was just right. He lopped off the foliage end, and then dropped back down some four feet to the base where it grew out of the trunk. Chopping it off with a few quick revs of the chainsaw, it dropped into the mud at his feet. Coming out from under the limbs, he killed the motor and stuck the saw on one of the remaining branches, juggled and nudged it a couple of times until it stayed put. Then he reached back for the freshly cut heavy club lying in the mud. Taking a moment to think, he looked at the car and decided he needed to try this first from the deck of the trunk lid. He yelled at the back window. “Cover your exposed skin. This glass will go everywhere!”
He waited a few seconds, and then struggled to get up on the back of the vehicle, barking his shins in the process. Groaning, he stood as straight as he could on one edge, reared back and swung with all his might. Both layers of the safety glass shattered, folding inward on the plastic lining sandwiched in the
