Brittany Davis

Issue 16

Flash Fiction

Something cries out in the marsh. It’s a horrible screech, the panicked fervor of something that knows it’s about to die. Distant lights swerve off the dirt road, rolling down the gravelly slope and careening into the murky depths of the midnight waters. An awful grinding sound, metal on metal on loose gravel stones, punctures the night air as the thing crunches and crumbles, leaving bits of shrapnel and broken glass in its wake. The tall grasses huddle together as the sounds wash over them, and a shiver runs up the spine of every bare-branched tree looming over the waterway.

The girl is alone. She is drunk. She was driving, but now she is sinking, silt-laden marsh water leaking into her mother’s 2017 Corolla Cross. Cracks in her windows, her windshield. She is dazed and nauseous, a red stripe running across her neck and chest from where the seatbelt has dug into her skin. The girl runs a clumsy hand over the mark, thinking of her girlfriend, that I told you so look she would have on her face if she were here right now. Seatbelts save lives, Beverly. Her girlfriend has always been the cautious one. Too much of a fretter for her own good. The girl does not normally wear a seatbelt when she drives, but tonight it was there for her, and though she likes to act like she doesn’t need it, she is thankful.

But now there’s a new mess she must confront. The car is wrecked— she knows that much. But her hands are numb and fumbling, her vision blurring and blackening. She manages to unhook her seatbelt from its lock, turns toward the driver’s side door and throws up into the built-in cup holder. The fluids from inside of her mix with the fluids filling the car; though the water is only up to her knees, the girl feels like she’s already swimming.

The girl feels a jolt as the tires beneath her strike the riverbed. The impact throws her now-unbelted body against the vomit-spattered door. The world tilts on its axis as the car lands on its side, the side mirror shattering into a spray of glittering pieces. The girl tries to maneuver herself around to the passenger door, but the water is falling onto her now. In the dark, she bruises her body even further, arms and ribs colliding with all manner of now-foreign, protruding objects; the steering wheel, the gear shift, the parking brake stuck out at an odd angle. As she reaches for the door handle now above her, she is struck with the realization that there is no air in her lungs. She feels the tightening, the compression, the burning in her chest as she tries desperately not to inhale a mouthful of water.

The thick, sluggish form of an alligator drifts by her car window. It hovers above the girl, curious, its gnarled maw spiked and flaring. The girl, in her delirium, wonders if it might be an angel, silhouetted by what little moonlight has filtered down here through the clouds of dirt and sand. She reaches up, up, until her hand can almost brush the alligator’s skin, can almost feel the leathery roughness of its scales, the rippling of its muscles just beneath the surface. They remain separated by a pane of glass, the girl’s palm pressed to the same place as the alligator’s fat claws. If she could just reach through this window, the alligator could take her hand and drag her to shore, to safety.

But the alligator is not an angel. It swims away as the girl pushes desperately against the door, against the weight of the water now flooding the vehicle, binding her clothes tight against her body and seeping into her bones. The girl pushes and pushes, but each push only fills her up more, only makes the door heavier. She cries. She screams. She throws up again. Somewhere on the floor, secured in her girlfriend’s waterproof case, her cell phone rings, screen lighting up with her girlfriend’s name.

When the crashing, rolling thing has settled, midnight stillness returns to the marsh. The tense grasses sigh and relax their huddle. The tree boughs creak and lean, peering through the swirling mud to the riverbed below. The alligator flicks its golden-yellow eyes up to the moon as the disturbance fades to nothing more than soft ripples on the water’s surface.