2003-10-31 - 8:44 pm (Samhain Road Encounter)

Garden State Parkway. Concrete rushes under wheels. Taillights breach the treeline.

Color change. Gray becomes red, a sudden border and absolute.

Blood across the asphalt, 3 lanes across and 3 seconds long.

A shape by the side of the lane, pale smeared crumpled very dead.

Skinny at one end, too skinny and smaller than it should be, smaller than it was.

How can one creature hold so much blood?

It's coming now, it's rushing up, it's off to one side, it's almost out of the lane, maybe I can
miss it, maybe

THACK

and tires are lifting and my first crazy thought is did the bone hurt my axle and my second is

Oh gods I hope that was a deer.

On my front steps, hours from where this night will carry me, a pomegranate-colored flower
sits in state, held and framed and cradled in the sunken remains of a sideways
jack-o-lantern. A carnation from Norma's offrenda, now my own small gift to the forgotten
dead. The outsiders, the unmourned, the murders and suicides and restless unknowing
spirits. The unnamed severed lives that lie in the road, that stain our vision and beat at our
tires.

You are remembered. Rest in peace.

 

-Nora copyright 2003