Race

Blackness. Have you ever been in a car crash? I have. Your mind creates a moment of serenity, an almost glacial stillness, I think its a moment of clairvoyance, your mind knows what is about to come and is trying to prepare you.. anyway, you pay for it very soon with the ugliest, most brutal chaos.

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It’s hard to think back to what happened and not feel a stinging sense of irony. What started as a race ended in immobility. Speed turns to inertia, heat to cold, hype to base, exhilaration to apathy. What.i am now? I have become the antonym of myself.

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Conscious. A stabbing painpainpain, like a clinical insertion of frozen glass, entering through my eyes and piercing my unresisting brain. I could have screamed but I couldn't, I came to realise that the pain wasn´t localised to my brain, or my eyes, but to the lost limb below my waist, a pain that would be my forever companion, how I missed its absence. I was lying in a white room, white care-bots(™) evaluated me. I closed my eyes and tumbled into the dark.

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Thunderous waves are quieter than the sounds of our engines, the nights uniform blackness pierced by triangulations of light scanning the peripheries and unknown borders of the road. Time undefined though fast moving, our races had become ever more central to our meaningless existences. We were country folk, there was no work, neo-industrialization had made us redundant, we had a salary paid for out of pity and shame by the state, we spent it on drugs and on our vehicles and used both simultaneously and liberally.

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You will become used to these new circumstances, you might surprise yourself, people find opportunities, the human is resilient, you must try to be positive, try not to give up. Being told this by a care-bot (™) nurse will and should, as you imagine and surely can emphasise with, elicit one rational response. Fuck off bot, I told it. It wheeled away efficiently.

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Do not give up, this will be a long night.. We took more amphetamines, speed, more irony. There were eight of us, in four cars, stretched across the main road in a line, it was 3am, revving and pushing the engines, we could feel the heat, the life inside of us creating purpose. I was passed the bottle, I imbibed of the fortuitous concoction. it will have contained acid, but I was already electric with the amphetamines so it didn´t really matter.

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Let me help you into the chair. There, now isnt that better? See? It’s comfortable and its practical, and it’s also pretty nice looking. You like wheels? You will be used to moving around, you wont want me to push, that would be humiliating for a young dynamic woman like you, even with your new, well, lets call it circumstance.

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We like wheels, let’s use them. That was our mantra, stupid maybe, simple, but true. And we screamed it at the top of our voices as we accelerated into the nights black embrace. Maybe if the bottle hadn´t been there, more or less forgotten between my legs, while we drove, maybe if we hadnt been quite so wasted, maybe if I had stayed at home watching tv, maybe if I hadn´t been born, maybe if I hadnt been dead already none of this would have happened.

---- To V.

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