Dead Mans Curve

Bodies hung upside down from the branches like pendulums. Roundheads swinging low and crooked, languidly in the evening breeze. Snapped limp necks, loose hair swatches and blue tipped limbs catch a slanted sun ray. An audible and steady squeak from the weight strain on the tree limbs twisted this neck, this vision, into fear. Have you heard this tree whine too?

If a car crashes in the desolate woods something must hear the screech, something feels the blustered push of mortal heavy air move across the land like an incessant wind rolling across treetops. Does the seagull still hear the waves crash? Because it is constant, whitewater sounds like white noise; white noise sounds like wind, one would assume. It did. It did.

The faded denim blue Chevy pickup trucks engine whines and screams about a red line, running hot and enraged with no tar to chew, its wheels spin furious, senseless, going nowhere. Launched off the vertical granite mountainside like a frisbee never retrieved. One moment frozen over another moment to become a sentence as it flies off, becoming too small to see. Wheels slowed. The contents inside the cab, the things we carry-drive with, all lifted.  A pen, change, papers wedged, internal organs floated, the heavy metal machine soared, the body taken. 

Captain of the ship goes down with the ship.

Or Up with it. Skyward, then tree ward, heavy, falling and finally, the impact-gone. White snow, white sky, all white. Silence moves in and out of cacophony, in a symphony of forest in protest of some interruption of standing still. Loud creaks that release into sharp snaps and hissing, a whistle, steam and fumes, the movement of wind is all there is.

There is nothing to see so the body struggles and manages to send out signals to foreign limbs to check in, to feel everything. There is throbbing, where the body begins and where some heavy pressure ends. Signals seem scrambled, censored, whitened out, buried in snow. And this body becomes aware, it is about to die. There is no cold. 

None knows where this body will lie. 

It doesn’t kill me. I see light.

I can focus a little and go towards it where it gets brighter and brighter-and I began to think of the irony; digging out of a hole and chasing the light…deafened by white noises, dodging death.

I pulled my waist out from my grave and lay folded on the snow. After a few minutes or an eternity, I pulled myself upright. Looking down at my physical being to survey my body briefly, I remember hearing a low grumble, my stomach?

No. Avalanche.

I turn my back to view the growing source from behind and take in a pile of cars. Stacked one on top of the other, more than five, against a granite cliff, shelved where no snow gathers. A bus size gust of wind pushed me two steps backward. Tripping, falling and forced to see on the left of the cars, all the bodies tangled in the treeline like broken limbs waiting to be shed in a storm, hanging on moss, some stiff and swinging like frozen pendulums. White went black. 

I awoke with my grandfather’s lucky pocket watch tick-tocking in my left ear, knowing it was not my own pulse made me shiver. 

I almost lost it. 

I am cold again.


Painting By Gustave_den_Duyts, Belgian painter, Ghent 1850 - Brussel, 1897 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.