"this is the day" by the the
this song inspired the prompt: the morning after a night when you didn't sleep: which inspired 2 responses
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The world always seemed a little more quiet in the mornings when I would drive home from the car factory in Kettering after working 3rd shift. And then there was my last morning drive. I remember feeling all right that morning, not as tired as usual, and maybe that's why I let my guard down.
I can still picture what it must've looked like. A driver held up by his seat belt, slumped forward, running through the STOP sign without the slightest bit of slowing down, moving closer and closer to the curb to line up perfect bumper to bumper with a big old pick up truck, metal crumpling on the front hood my little '86 Plymouth Horizon, a small dent in the bumper of the parked truck. And that's where I came back to consciousness.
I wasn't panicked, but I heard fluids dripping; I felt sore. I unbuckled my seat belt, opened the door, and just kind of rolled out of the car and onto the middle of the street. It didn't take long for a woman from across the street to come and check on me. Of course, she was an off duty cop. She would actually help cut me slack on my ticket. A few minutes later, a red minivan came rolling down the street on its way to work: my mom. I'm just sitting in the street with my arms hung over my legs talking to this off-duty cop with ambulance and patrol car on the way--about 10 houses down the street.
Mom, of course, stops and calls off work to make sure I'm all right. Around the same time the owner of the vehicle and his family come out of their house to see what's going on. And now, after years of wondering aloud at the sign, I finally found out who the deaf kid on the block was that produced the DEAF CHILDREN AT PLAY sign. Yeah, it was, of course, the owner of the truck. He was grown now, but still deaf. I hit the deaf-child-at-play's freaking truck. Damn.
And anyway, everything after that was a blur, and I was all right, the deaf kid was all right, everyone in the whole damn world was all right. But that was when I knew I could no longer pull 3rd shifts at Delphi.
- by Robert Lee Brewer
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- by Jason O'Mara
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prompt response - main