a nineteenth story...'a prelude to Crash'

Somebody’s feet were sticking through the smashed windshield.  The passenger seat was soaked with blood.  The blood dripped from the seat onto the chassis, from the chassis onto the tarmac, and half merged with a pool of motor oil.  The motor oil was seeping from a hole the size of fist in the fuel tank of the motor cycle, front wheel caught under the crumpled bumper of the motor car, back wheel still spinning.  The driver of the motor cycle was spread-eagled in the road ten yards away, limbs splayed at all angles like a mangled and discarded puppet.  The distant hum of the freeway provided an indifferent backdrop to sudden and unequivocal death.

I unscrewed the lens cap of my single lens reflex camera, and adjusted the focus, zeroing in on the dark flecks of blood across the windshield, drying in the afternoon heat; white sunlight glancing off the steel and chrome body of the motor car.  The brutality of the collision was remarkable. 

After taking a few close up photographs of the front of the motor car, I moved round to peer in at the driver with a mixture of trepidation and excitement.  The driver was a female, between seventeen and eighteen years of age.  She had been thrown violently forwards and then backwards by the impact of the crash.  A shard of window glass had pierced her neck below her right ear and a deep wound was throbbing blood at intervals.  Her jaw was a hundred and twenty degrees to the rest of her face.  She was wearing tight, blue denim hotpants, and a T-shirt with the Sign of the Cross.

I placed my camera on top of the roof of the motor vehicle, and tentatively reached inside the cockpit, searching for a pulse on her neck.  The cooling fan on the dashboard was hissing.  I had to put my fingers inside the wound.  With my eyes closed I felt around for a few seconds.  The wound was warm, and I sensed again the pristine smell of blood.  But there was nothing.  She too was dead, gone.  Gone before the paramedics could save her.  Gone before she had ever been fucked.

The paramedics.  In the frenzy of the crash I had forgotten about them.  A sudden realisation caught me:  while fate simply decreed I had been following the motor car when the motor cycle bored into it, and the motor car into the concrete reservation, perhaps it would have been expected of me to drive on by, leaving the chaos and calamity behind in the same manner as traffic passing on the distant freeway. 

In a mild panic, I swept up my camera and retreated from the accident, past the dead motor cyclist, to my Sedan on the hard shoulder twenty yards beyond.  The motor was still running, and I opened the side door, throwing my camera onto the back seat among the sprawl of porno magazines. 

About a mile along the winding B road, I pulled over again in a lay-by surrounded with trees.  Witnessing a car wreckage of such magnitude first hand had aroused something inside of me.  The afternoon heat was stifling and oppressive.  The air beneath the canopy of the trees would be cooler.  I took off my jean belt and got out of the Sedan, carrying a magazine from the back seat with me.