Swerve by Tamara Barrett

Q never swerved to avoid a beast on the road – dead or alive. He would drive through it with an iron fist, as if fur and soft tissue were nothing. A mental illustration of focus, a kind of road karate like the art of board breaking. Always direct your power beyond the wood stack. A fox, a kangaroo – he had a bull bar and was not squeamish about death – an emu once near Broken Hill, had snapped a rabbit’s neck.

I look out the side mirror. Bracken fern, guide posts, dried grass are cast red momentarily in the tail lights, then discarded in the blackness. Night is a canvas for abstract thoughts of departure. An airport, a campervan alone up the east coast of Australia. A good escape is ninety per cent mental. We had descended through the scree of an argument since we left the mountain village. Past boulder fields, snow gums with their smooth trunks shedding white ribbons of bark, branches bent under imaginary snowfall. I had thought of silence as a kind of resistance. You’re going too fast, I say.

There is a goat standing in the road, eyes aglow like tiny copper coins. Q swerves. The ute slides on the wet towards the narrow shoulder, towards the forest suspended from the sky with taut navy thread. A mountain gum fills the windscreen and the force of the impact peels back the bonnet like skin from bone. A slow bloom of shattering glass. Talc particles burst from the airbag cavity, suspended in the cabin like tiny questions on matters of survival and time.

I can’t be sure the crash isn’t coming from inside me. We break things, Q and I. But the engine ticks as it cools, steam rises. A rearrangement of material has occurred, acted on by an external force. The tree trunk, lit by the distorted beam of a single headlight, with its amber beads of sap and rough bark, comes in and out of focus.

I wake alone. Q is gone. The bulkhead collapsed, driver door open. Oh, thrown clear. Beyond the spot-lit tree, a thick blackness, a silence. Pain has an irrelevance with nobody to tell it to, and blood cools quickly like any liquid. Some of it pools in my lap. The radio is playing. It’s mostly static burr, then words break through like morse code. A brain will shake like a jelly when it’s thrown at a stationary object.  Rain falls on the sagging windscreen. Sap beads quiver and swell. This is brain injury watching itself. Hardly any car crashes result in fire, but there will be blood. How do you think of pain, of death? And when we were dating, he once sent me a love fax to a hotel where I was staying. Neruda poetry and something about love. And whales? Twelve mini pages on index cards. Well yeah, it all seems vast and deep until someone is thrown clear, silence on either side.

The road pulses red and blue in the wet asphalt, catches in the fractured glass. Voice comes from the surface of the ocean and I am sinking. I was being practical. I could replicate my mother’s practicality with her grim precision. You’re very cold. When was the last time you felt something? Q said. Now I will feel everything, soon to be pulled free from my metal shell, clear and raw. Soon to turn my face up to the deep night sea.

Tamara Barrett

Banner Image@ Pixabay.com – broken windscreen glass.