Time stopped for me one Saturday night a year ago, at eleven-thirty-five p.m. I’d no sense of danger as I meandered home in the dark and if there was an omen present in the stars, then I missed all the signs. That’s not surprising because I’m not superstitious and my attention was elsewhere as I approached the crossroads.

Sylvie and I had argued earlier about my impromptu night out, and she’d sent endless messages to my phone expressing her annoyance. It was nothing to get upset about and I ought to have apologised rather than exchanged contentious kerbside texts.

Ping! Ping! Ping!  

More messages appeared in the palm of my hand as I listened out for traffic. I wasn’t in the mood for a shouting match and suggested she ought to calm down and back off.

The green traffic light changed to amber as I rattled off my ill-chosen words.

Ping! Ping! 

I should have ignored her hasty responses when the traffic signal turned red, but I glanced down at my phone. The pedestrian crossing bleeped somewhere behind me as I stepped forward, tapping out a reply, oblivious to the oncoming vehicle. 

Thwump!

I’d barely set foot on the glistening tarmac before my future was decided. The collision’s devastating impact threw me upward, and I heard a furious screech. I completed an ungainly mid-air somersault and the Pontiac Firebird flew into a concrete lamp post. Its horn started honking like an irate goose and I hit the asphalt head first, still clutching my phone. 

#

The pungent stench of scorched rubber seared the back of my throat as I lay motionless in a dishevelled heap. It seemed like forever before I heard the creak of the car’s twisted door open ajar and spotted two blood-shot eyes peering out. The driver’s unshaven jaw jutted below his bruised face and he surveyed the carnage, considering the options. Overhead, the traffic lights changed to green, but all remained still at the junction. There’d been no passing vehicles or pedestrians present to witness our collision; we were both frozen in a nightmarish tableau.

The harsh scrape of a rickety sash-window interrupted the moment, and a woman screamed obscenities into the night’s starless void. Her angry voice had fierce competition from the Pontiac’s relentless honking, but it was strident enough to draw attention from her neighbours. The driver’s leather-soled boots crunched on fragments of glass as he stumbled out, gripping the doorframe with tattooed hands. I tried to call out, but my shattered chest wheezed in agony like an undignified party balloon, lacking the manners to deflate in silence or the enthusiasm to burst and be damned. The driver cursed under his breath as he backed away, abandoning his car at the junction. His eyes darted about as he fled from the yells of residents appearing at their apartment windows.

My eyelids flickered in pitiful spasms as I struggled to remain conscious. My world darkened as hypnotic mandalas danced in front of me before dissolving into lurid, pulsing specular highlights. The frequency and intensity of the visual disturbances diminished until they vanished from view and all went black. 

#

Time had ceased and my head felt full of air. 

My limbs were weightless and all the pain had disappeared.

I opened my eyes and drew a sharp intake of breath because I was hovering up in the air above the crash site. My crumpled body was still lying on the ground below.

This isn't real, I told myself. It's just a dream. 

The crossroads beneath me looked like a child’s scale model of an imaginary accident in a toy town. Miniature emergency vehicles arrived in a blaze of flashing blue lights, and tiny uniformed figures scurried about like ants in a sugar bowl.

The Pontiac’s V-8 engine was still chugging fumes and dribbling condensation from the exhaust pipe when the medics arrived. From my vantage point on high, I watched them insert a cannula in my arm and attach a plasma bag. They attempt mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions, which achieved little more than squeezing my shattered sternum and increasing the amount of structural damage to my diaphragm. 

Their best hope was the defibrillator.

Stand back! 

Those guys mean business.

Clear!

There’s a spine twisting jolt. 

Then it felt like being sucked down by a plughole.

Imagine, if you can, falling from a cloud on a bungee rope.  

An irresistible force pulled me downwards on an invisible tether. 

With arms outstretched, I saw tiny sparks fly from my finger-tips to my rigid body. 

I was millimetres away from recovering my life before an unseen celestial force catapulted me back up to my ‘seat in the gods.’

The second time they administered the shock, the vortex drew me down again, but I got nowhere close to my shattered body and zipped up again.

The third attempt at resuscitation almost worked. 

It felt as though I might have had a chance, having made a positive connection. 

There was an air of expectation amongst the crowd attending my recovery. 

My eyes fluttered open for a moment, but that was all that happened. 

I couldn’t hold on. 

The spark of life had gone. 

I flew upward one last time; then nothing. 

My mortal coil slackened, and I felt its eternal grip relax. The connection to the physical world drifted away from me. It was like watching a severed umbilical cord floating away from a placenta in a cavernous womb.

#

I could hear the activity at the crossroads and watched them manoeuvre my tortured remains onto a stretcher before loading it into the back of the ambulance. I studied that dark-stained spot on the ground where I’d collapsed, as if it were the one true thing in the world, which it was. 

My resting place.

#

An officer removed the keys from the firebird’s ignition and gave instructions to the vehicle recovery team to protect vulnerable bodywork from additional scratches. Before hauling it onto the low loader, they wrapped chains round its axles and swathed it in a loose-fitting tarpaulin until it resembled a last-minute Christmas gift, presented in haste to avoid social embarrassment.

From up above, my last impression of the Pontiac was the Phoenix design on the crumpled hood; its beady eye peaking up at me between the tarpaulin sheets. I recall thinking how the car looked incongruous, hanging in mid-air as if they were training it to take to the skies and fly away. 

No doubt they’ll straighten out the vehicle’s dents, adjust the paintwork, and someone else will have the pleasure of charging through town at a hundred miles an hour.

#

Time was broken. My way of measuring is gone now. Before the crash, my work-life marked the hours and days of the week; client meetings, risk assessments, and endless reports and responses; training sessions in summer and professional development in the winter. The weeks, months and seasons revolved in procession, each day a series of sequential vistas.

It also occurred to me, what a relief it to vanish off the face of the earth, escaping the corrosive tedium of a rigid daily routine and to vanish in a dream, out of my body in spirit form. Chains clattering empty to the floor. But that was before I grasped the unbearable notion of forevermore and total freedom.

#

The Pontiac itself was a point of no return. Time is a rear-view mirror now, the past rushing backward to the vanishing point. I recall a visit to my former home and standing in our lounge while Sylvie boxed-up my former worldly possessions with her back turned. It was too sad to bear, so sad that it gave me a breathless, choking feeling to witness it. Somehow, my disappearance was already gone.

I had already turned into a memory, a ghost. 

#

Sylvie blamed herself, of course. When they examined my phone records and uncovered my data usage, they revealed her frenzied messages. They surmised that I’d been reading them as I strolled off the curb into the path of the speeding Pontiac.

The lawyers didn’t spare her the details at the coroner’s inquest. Each sordid accusation and undeserved piece of malice painted its own picture and portrayed her in a poor light. Not that my demise was her fault. However, the insurance company was keen to reduce the proceeds given to my next of kin; citing her influence on my mental health and apportioning blame. In the end, nobody benefitted from my life insurance and the event wounded everyone. And I now have eternity to wander and wonder how to fill my days. I’ve no shelf life and no end date in sight. I exist between heaven and Earth till the end of time. When my family and friends remember me nowadays, it’s as an eternal twenty-seven-year-old who died before his time.

THE END