Inner Workings discussion

Last Tuesday night, the scream of a siren left me standing bewildered and barefoot on the front porch.

Oftentimes, when we hear the sirens wail, it's our volunteer fire department (the big red engine, the smaller white water truck, or both) flying up the street toward the highway in search of a grassfire. But this time, it was the silver cop car. He must have been slamming his foot into the floorboard. The car shot out from the highway and toward the middle of town like a bullet. Red and blue lights spattered across my living room walls. I stepped outside and watched it coast down the street towards the car wash and past the frozen lawn statues of Saint Cecilia's. I thought it might have been Larry Burns (the blundering chief of police who everyone waves and nods to but in secret they'd rather throw him in a pit of cat shit) but he normally drives the Bronco and works during the day, chasing cows off the road or catching up on politics down at the Town and Country Deli.

It was too dark to see any possible smoke or where the police car might have turned. Then I heard a second siren. It was different, not like the fire truck at all. It was the horrific shrill of an ambulance. The squeals rippled and sliced a path through sixth street and then stopped as quickly as they had started, now just as still as the night air. I waited. I picked a sticker from the bottom of my foot. I breathed in the cold, uneasy silence and thought about my children. It was oddly quiet, as if all of our teenagers had gone to sleep at the same time. About ten minutes later, a ghost of a siren reappeared in the night, its soft scream now carried from some unknown origin, lost in the dark empty stretch between our town and the next town over. I decided that it was probably nothing to get worked up about and that I should stop standing on my front porch in my pajamas for all the world to see.

A few days ago, at the post office, I heard that a young waitress was loosing her mind. She was probably about twenty-one, they said. It had happened on a Tuesday night. She had been driving home from work, probably thinking about what color to paint her nails the next day when a little four-year-old boy darted into the street from between two parked cars.

I don't know why I'm writing about this. It's very disturbing and I don't want to think about it anymore... but at the same time, I can't not think about it. The little boy's funeral was yesterday.

Oh GOD, Look after them all.

Finely written, great details, sorry about the loss of the boy but I think your observational piece is better than John Carver's fiction about the somewhat same incident.

Thank you for those compliments, Patrick. I think writing about it helped me to aknowledge the accident but still keep some distance from it. I live on the main street between the church and the highway that leads to the cemetary. Most all of the funeral processions pass by my house.

I didn't know the little boy or his family, or the young lady. She's in therapy right now. I imagine if that were one of my children I might have to be heavily sedated. It's overwhelmingly horrid.

that's some bad stuff but great writing. children shouldn't die. i cannot put myself in that driver's shoes. those are shoes i don't even want to see.

Wow..that brings up some memories. I was in the car when I was a teenager when my mother was the driver of a car that hit a little girl that darted into the road. The girl was fine...a few bumps and bruises...but I couldn't sleep for a long time without seeing her little face. Don't know why I needed to share that...sorry.

Just the same, the writing is great. I agree with Patrick, the details add that extra something special.

Memories like that will pop up. They stick with you. I hit a ditch at 70 mph once. The car flipped over and grated across the highway. Now, whenever I hear a train, I'm reminded of that scraping sound of metal on asphalt. For weeks, I kept seeing that lighted dashboard upside down in my sleep.

I was in a serious car accident at 17 that left my knees permanently messed up.

To this day I am the most cautious left turner you'll ever see, even though I wasn't the person making the left person or at fault... they do stay with you.

Now, when I see a bad accident, sometimes when I see an ambulance, it's pretty much the only time I pray -- for whomever was in the car/cars.