“The Accident” Buhito Press. Web. (October 2014)

The Accident The world is silent as I watch the green trees do cartwheels against the black night. The sound of a heavy fall and the jolt of sudden pain spreading the length of my right side bring me out of my trance. The world rights itself then and, when I lift and turn my head as far as the pain will let me, I see that my body bisects the solid white line on the black asphalt. I scream. Almost immediately, dark windows light into life to my right, soon followed by the chain link sounds of someone climbing a wire fence. I see dark shadows advance while voices call out into the night and a sobbing man runs to my side. The man is not my husband. His hands shake as he offers me a cigarette and spills several of them over my body, before I am able to calm him down. Where is my husband? The man shakes his head and turns away while a woman covers me with a blanket that weighs more than my body can bear. Her soft words are drowned by much louder ones in the distance. The ambulance arrives and one of the paramedics disperses the crowd around me and calls for his colleague to help him lift me onto a gurney. As they load me into the ambulance, I see that another person is already there. His face and neck are covered in blood. I am told that my husband is unconscious but alive. We were hit by a Jaguar. A drunken American GI was speeding on the wrong side of the English road. The car hit me first, hurling me to the middle of the road. My husband, turning around at the loud thump, was thrown head first through the car’s windshield and carried a few hundred yards

before being tossed on the left side of the road. We had been walking to the Lakenheath Air Force Base because our car had broken down again.