The Whale Belly

I was scanning the olives when I heard what I first thought were the shopping aisles collapsing like dominos. I winced, then whipped my head around expecting to see something like a tsunami of groceries swelling towards me, but everything in my visual field was absurdly stable. Still, the grinding and smashing of glass and metal grew louder to the point that my body wanted to climb to higher ground. Then everything was silent, and I saw other bewildered shoppers fill the big windows that face the street and others spill into the parking lot.

I found my girlfriend near the deli. She looked confused, as I’m sure I did, too. We joined the crowd forming just outside the front door. We were near several hospitals so emergency vehicles had already arrived, but they hadn’t cleaned anything up yet. On the sidewalk a growing crowd of spectators and EMTs formed around two unmoving bodies flickering red and blue under the flashing lights from the fire engine and fleet of ambulances. One was a very large man twisted at unnatural angles, the other a young woman on her back with her eyes open. I looked down the street, and a block away a small SUV smoldered in the shape of an accordion underneath the dry cleaner’s sign, which was bent over like it had been punched in the stomach, its spinning sign hung limply from its wires.

My car was parked in the parking space next to the sidewalk, and I had left my dog in it with the windows rolled down. I ran over to check on her and she stared back at me with her big, wondering eyes. I put a leash on her and we went back to the crowd.

We overheard the story. The vehicle drifted across two lanes into oncoming traffic, then leapt up onto the sidewalk where the two people were waiting at the bus stop. She ploughed through them and clipped the side of the grocery store, and continued driving on the sidewalk for a block until the dry cleaner’s sign stopped her.

We saw the police remove the driver from the car. She staggered and the police had to hold her up. We later learned that she had recently been released from the nearby hospital with a prescription of narcotic pain pills for neck pain. We also learned that the large man she ran over had died almost immediately, and that the young woman, barely in her twenties, survived, but half of her face had been scraped off.

But all my girlfriend and I knew at the moment was how fragile our lives were, and how senselessly dangerous and stupid things were arranged in a society. Cars could run you over, buildings could collapse, highways could flood entire towns. We had to get the car home, but I could only get myself to drive fifteen miles an hour through empty neighborhood streets, because everything, the laws of physics, fate, the will of God, all seem bent on violently destroying our bodies and casting our corpses aside like roadkill.

Days passed. Weeks. Years. And now I have to try very hard to care about it at all.