by Malik Will
The train slows. The figure heads toward the train. Daniel opens the door. The figure walks closer. Daniel squints his eyes, attempting to see its face. The way it moves seems so familiar. He knows it.
“Who’s there?” he shouts as he walks out of the streetcar. His loud voice causes the passengers to jerk alert.
The drunk awakens and walks to the front of the streetcar. He gawks through the windows staring at Daniel.
Daniel sees the figure, but not its face. “Come into the light,” he says.
The figure hesitates a moment, but in time walks into the light, revealing itself. The light reveals it to be not a man, but a child. A young girl, in fact.
Daniel walks closer. Her eyes are all too familiar. He removes her hood, exposing a round burn mark on her temple. Daniel steps back, runs into the streetcar and quickly shuts the door. He pants.
“What’s going on?” asks the drunk.
Daniel composes himself by talking slow breaths, ignoring the drunk’s question.
“Daniel, what the fuck is going on?” he says again.
Daniel pulls the lever to accelerate the streetcar. The girl still stands in the middle of the tracks. She doesn’t move.
She is just as audacious as she was in that dream, gawking in the face of death.
The streetcar moves closer and closer.
“JUST MOVE,” says Daniel.
But she doesn’t. Instead, she lies in the middle of the tracks, daring him to continue.
The streetcar gets closer. The length of a broomstick is what divides eighty tons of steel from tumbling down on her. There is no room for those steel wheels to go but onto her bones.
All the passengers on C114 are on their feet in awe. Those steel wheels are but an inch from her skull.
The passengers, both nervous and shaken, gasp in perpetuity.
The girl, brazen and unabashed, closes her eyes in acceptance. As the steel wheels on that machine reached the top of her skull, it comes to a stop.
And freezes.
Daniel had pulled the accelerator back. The passengers, still on their feet, watch as he exits the streetcar once again. He walks toward the young girl and stands above her with his shoe inches from her foot.
“You don’t exist,” he says.
The girl smirks while pulling herself up from the tracks. She dusts the gravel from her clothes. “Why don’t I exist?”
“Because I saw you die! I saw it!”
The young girl smiles and walks onto the sidewalk. “Don’t be so trite. How can you see with such blinded eyes? Why do you say these things? You live in a world where you see absolutely nothing but lies and misery, all of which are conveniently free from your doing. I may not exist in your world, but I do exist in this one.”
Daniel sneers and abruptly walks toward the girl. “Stay off my goddamn tracks. You hear me?” He hurries back onto C114 and slams down to the accelerator lever at maximum speed. He stares back at the young girl who again becomes a blurred figure in the dark. She would do the same as the streetcar rides into the shadows of the night, until there is nothing but darkness to look back at. Daniel turns his eyes back toward the road.
By then, he had already run a red light on a busy intersection, giving that old familiar story of cause and effect a chance to render its ugly head. And he’s a brutal sort, always anal about facts and preciseness. There’s no place for such things in his world.
Daniel see’s what’s happening. Time has been slowed for some reason, just so he can catch every moment. He sees the 18-wheeler coming. But he cannot react expediently. All he can do is endure as the streetcar falls to its side.
He watches as his body moves slowly out of the seat. His lunch scatters, along with his bottled water.
He watches as the water falls apart. It was once whole, now it’s not; its remains touch everyone.
He watches all the passengers fly as well with such delicacy. They dance across each side of the streetcar like ballerinas. Their screams ricochet off of each other’s ears, one after another.
As the streetcar reaches the ground, he watches the tanker fall on top of the streetcar. The metal sinks in, similar to when a soda can is smashed.
Daniel looks up and sees liquid slowly falling from the tanker onto the passengers on C114. But there is a weird color to the liquid. It’s a brownish gold color and its taste is beyond foul. It surely isn’t water.
When he finally rises to his knees and reads the writing on the tanker: Shell, an oil and gas company, time reverts back to its normal state.
The streetcar lies flipped on its side. He searches for a way out. But the situation is calamitous. The windows on the right side of the streetcar are blocked by concrete. The left side is also blocked as the tanker truck lies completely across, blocking every possible escape route.
The only way out is through the front window. He’s shaken from the crash. His vision blurry. Gas continues to pour into the streetcar causing it to fill up similar to water in a sink.
The smell dazes him. He presses his fingernails into his brow. The collision had sent him flying backwards, where his face unfortunately met a window that created a gash on the left side of his cheek. Gas has entered the wound, bringing a burning sensation to his entire face.
He gets up, slow, trying not to slip on the gasoline covered floors. He pulls two thick shards of glass from his face.
The seats where all the passengers once sat, are all empty. The streetcar is misty and dark.
“Is everyone okay?” he shouts.
No one replies.
He crawls to the back of the streetcar, feeling with his hands. He does this until he touches the foot of the drunk. “Are you okay, man?”
The drunk does not respond. As Daniel moves closer, he grabs the drunk by the shirt and attempts to pull him up out of the gasoline. It takes a while, but he does. When the drunk is pulled above the puddles, Daniel sees that he no longer has a head. It has been severed from his body and lies, smashed between metal and Louisiana concrete.
Daniel recalls that his head was against the window while he slept. He guesses that it’s fitting that if he had to die, he died there. Maybe now, he can finally rest.
Daniel moves the drunk’s legs to the side and crawls to the back of the streetcar. He sees the lovebirds next. They did not suffer the same fate. They survived the crash. But one of the metal rods from inside the streetcar has pierced one of the man’s legs. In turn, he was rendered helpless. But his lover sits right by his side, un-wavered. “Everything’s gonna be okay, babe. We’re gonna make it out together. I promise.”
Daniel moves further to the back, crawling through the ever-rising fuel. He’s looking for the single mom. Her prosthesis had been separated from her leg. It lies in a sea of gasoline. He picks it up and drags it as he searches, groping with his hand in the dark. He finds her, leaning against the wall with her eyes closed. He takes two fingers and places it on her neck to check her pulse. But there is no pulse. She is dead.
As she lies there, all those beautiful shiny dresses that were in that black bag, lie soaked underneath it all. Daniel notices a picture frame near her body. He pulls it from the gas. It’s a picture of young woman and two kids. Daniel places the picture onto the lap of the deceased woman, and somberly whispers, “Go home.”
As he crawls back to the front of the streetcar, he assures the lovebirds all will be fine. “Hold on! I’ll go get help,” he screams.
He crawls toward the only possible exit, the dashboard window of the streetcar. The glass is cracked, but the window is still very much in place. He kicks the glass once. But only a tiny piece breaks off. This is not the typical glass we see in our homes. It’s about five times as thick as a normal glass window. He tries again, causing a bigger piece to shatter. But the hole is not big enough to fit through.
Daniel tries a third time and a fourth and a fifth time. He kicks repeatedly until the hole is big enough to crawl through. He cuts his own leg in the process.
When the hole is
finally big enough, he limps out into the street, screaming at the top of his lungs, “HELP! SOMEBODY HELP US! HELP US!”
But there is no help to be found. There are no cars passing by. There is no one in sight. He is all alone. Daniel falls to his knees crying like he has never done before.
Then a voice sounds from the distance. “They’re gone, Daniel.”
He turns around, rattled and confused. He sees the figure, the girl from the tracks standing right above him. He rises to his feet.
“Help us, please! Go get help.”
The young girl shakes her head and moves closer until they are within arm’s length.
She places her hands on his cheeks and caresses. “They do not exist, Danny. They are all in your head.”
Daniel becomes angry and snatches the girl’s hands from his face. “No! You don’t exist.”
He runs to the front of the streetcar, checking on the lovebirds. The gasoline has risen to their necks. They’ve both covered their mouths and nose with dry clothes to protect themselves from the choking smell. There isn’t much time. The girl’s voice, pitying. “You can’t save them,” she says.
“YES I CAN! I CAN!” He again runs to the back of the streetcar, looking for anything to free the lovebirds as the gas has now begun to pour into the street, leaking from the cracked windows and splintered steel. It became mixed with the truck driver’s blood as his torso lies hanging through the tanker’s window.
A metal instrument lies in street. Daniel figures he can use this to break the steel pole that has impaled one of the lovebirds. He runs to grab it. As fate would have it, the power line that the streetcar used for energy, bursts from its line and falls into the middle of the street, right in front of the metal instrument.
The wire snaps back and forth while the gas that has been spilling from the tanker gushes with more fervor than before. He wants so bad to reach that instrument. But he cannot. All he can do is watch.
Daniel turns back toward the girl from the tracks and again pleads. “HELP US! PLEASE!”
The gas inches toward the power line as every second becomes a step closer to death.
“There is nothing that can be done.”
Daniel runs to the front of the streetcar. The gas is within a few feet of the power line. He sees the lovebirds consoling one another. He sticks his arm inside the streetcar. “COME ON! THERE’S NO TIME! GRAB MY HAND!”
But only one of the lovebirds reaches for his hand. As she holds on, she stares firmly into the eyes of her wounded lover. No words are ever spoken. There were merely tears as they allowed their hearts to talk for them.
Daniel knows what he is asking. For her to be rescued, she must in turn, leave her lover behind.
“MA’AM! WE HAVE TO LEAVE NOW!”
Her lover wipes her face free of tears and somberly instructs her. “You must go,” he says.
“No! No! I can’t!”
He pulls his hand away from hers and again says, “You must!”
Daniel screams, “COME ON, LADY. THERE’S NO TIME.”
When Daniel pulls her toward the window in a last-ditch attempt, she rips her arms away from his and replies, “There’s always time,” and lies her head quietly onto her lover’s shoulders.
Her lover attempts to persuade her to leave again. But she shushes him. “Let’s not waste our time yelling.” And so he concedes and kisses her head.
Daniel pulls his arm out of the train. By that time, the gas had reached the power line. The flames rip through the streetcar, burning all things inside and out. While Daniel watches, those flames would surely intensify, causing an explosion of the streetcar and the tanker.
The power of the blast propels Daniel from his feet, slams his head into those iron streetcar tracks. As he lays bleeding and unconscious, the girl from the tracks kneels and places her hands on top of his.
She says a prayer in his name. “Father, your child lives in a world where the truth does not. He sees not with his heart, but only what his mind allows. Please bring him back to when he was a child. And a shine light into his darkest corners so that he may one day see.”
CHAPTER SIX
So That You May be Healed