The car crash happened in a nano second, in a stab of light. For years the boy would describe what had happened as a near-death experience to strangers in run-down piano bars, but the boy knew words wouldn’t do it justice; how they were empty vessels compared to what had happened on that frenzied Philadelphia thoroughfare.
It wasn’t just that the crash had felled acres of neuron-branches across the forest of the boy’s brain, having rattled his skull with vertiginous migraines and permanent memory loss. It wasn’t the uncontrollable rage the boy couldn’t keep a lid on in every serious relationship thereafter. The two divorces, the revolving door of therapists, the weight gain by virtue of his primordial hankering for chocolate milkshakes.
It wasn’t the fact that Ruthie Halpern, the boy’s best friend’s mother and semi-famous jazz pianist, who’d graciously agreed to schlep the boy to his travel soccer practice that morning while his own parents were off hiking Machu Picchu, had momentarily taken her eyes off the road, suffering fractured ribs and broken fingers, thereby shattering Halpern’s career and forcing her to hang up the ivory keys for good.
It wasn’t the fact that the clichéd expression life will flash before your eyes suddenly earned a fresh pelt of meaning as they tooled toward collision, each small triumph and remorse populating out of thin air like a kind of pretzeled mobius strip.
This story really starts now, a generation after the crash. After preschool teacher Madison Dust drummed at her wheel with restless glee, zig zagging lanes to catch her impending flight to Portland. The pregnant daughter in Portland whose water had just burst, and who’d be in labor bearing Madison Dust’s first grandchild. The baby girl who’d soon become her grandmother’s namesake. And later, decades later, the beloved girl who’d grow up wondering about her provenance, snooping through old boxes in the basement to discover the newspaper article with a browning photo of her late grandmother’s fatal crash.
The plume of smoke mushrooming over her grandmother’s totaled carmine-red Toyota Avalon; her flaccid body being lifted onto a stretcher by three first responders; an unidentified boy squeezing her swollen hands, a willowy boy whose mouth was ajar, as though adrenaline had flung him into an exclamation point, as though he’d tried his best to tell the soon-to-be grandmother both hello and goodbye.
Ezra is a poet and journalist who writes in Philadelphia. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his work has appeared in Philadelphia Stories, Identity Theory, and Bending Genres, among others. You can follow his writings on Twitter @SolwayEzra
Lost Balloon 