fantasy

Speak Again Bright Angel – Chapter 2

/ boz bozeman / Leave a comment

Chapter 2 

Sarah closes her eyes, but that just makes the sirens louder. Their sound confirms the dreadful terror that swirls inside her. She can’t handle the pain she is in. 

That’s when something different breaks through: concern. Jonathan. He’s next to her, and he whispers, “Sarah?” 

She opens her eyes. “Jonathan!” she says. She hates how weak she feels as she reaches up to him. “Jonathan, please. Help me.” 

He bends down next to her and reaches out his hand. “Take my hand, Sarah. I’ll help you up.” 

Contact amplifies his feelings inside her, and she jumps like he stung her.  There is an electric shock, and he staggers back. The intensity lessens when the contact breaks, but her confusion grows. “I can’t touch anything else, but I can feel you.”  

“Oh, Sarah,” he says. His words match what she is feeling from him. “It’s so bad, how you feel. I can’t stand it it’s so bad.” 

“I’m sorry,” Sarah says. 

“No, no, I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just… It’s just I don’t know how you can stand it, how I can help you stand it?” 

“I don’t know.” With Jonathan there, she can say it. “Oh, my God,” Sarah whimpers. “God, Jonathan, we’re dead.” 

His sympathy and sadness change inside her, turning into guilt. 

For a time, he only shakes his head from side to side.  “Sarah. I …” His head bends. “I don’t know what to say.” He points to the car.  “I’m unconscious. I don’t know if I’m OK or not. But I’m not dead.” 

Disbelief and panic rise together. “That’s not true!” She points at him. “Then how are you here talking to me?” 

 “I don’t know. Right after the crash, somehow, you were pulling me, and you got me out of the car and my … my body.” He stops. “Sarah, I don’t understand what’s happening.” The pleading in his eyes is inside her. “I’m so sorry.” 

Anger tears through her. She shouts, “Damn it!” She swings away from him, yelling, “Why?” Her rage pulses like a red scar ripping through the night. 

The night screams back with shrieking sirens, spinning lights and screeching tires. 

The first responders jump out and race to her car. A paramedic shines a flashlight into the driver’s side.  She looks in for a moment. “Miss?” she calls loudly, but her tone is hopeless. “We’re here to help you. What’s your name?”  It was as though she has to say it but doesn’t expect a response.  

The fireman behind her takes off his helmet, pushes his hair back, and turns to the gathered responders. “We’ll need to cut her out.” He gestures to the officers around. “We’re going to need a clear perimeter to extract her body safely.” 

 Sarah’s face contorts, the words searing her with more evidence of her death. “Sarah,” Jonathan says. She turns to him.  “Sarah, you don’t need to see this. Come with me.”  

He reaches to her, and his care helps quench her panic. This time she is ready for the jolt of energy when he touches her. Again, his concern is amplified, and it steadies her. Gently, he turns her away from the car. She follows slowly, shuffling like an elderly woman. 

Then a thought spins her away from his hand, and she cries out, “Oh my God, my parents!” She pictures their stricken faces and sways, staggering a step.  

She’s about to black out. Jonathan shouts “Sarah!” and grabs her arm. “Please! It’s too intense.”  

The fear and concern coming from him halts her rising madness.  

 “Oh, Jonathan, this is going to kill them. Why the hell did I have to go to that stupid Halloween party?”  

“Sarah, you didn’t do -” Jonathan’s voice cuts out. Focusing on his face, she sees the shock that mirrors what she feels inside. “Oh, no. Sarah, I’m so sorry.” 

Jonathan’s hand pulls away from her.  Something is dragging him backwards, a force he is straining against. “Don’t leave me Jonathan!” she screams, but his form becomes as thin as mist, and he drifts away. 

*** 

Everything is dark, and there are distant voices. A man says, “That’s where it must have hit him. Look at how red that mark is.” 

“Knocked him out cold,” a woman replies. “Has to be the airbag.” 

Jonathan moans, struggling to understand why he is seeing red. Then he realizes his eyes are closed, and there is a light shining on his face. He opens his eyes, and the flashlight pulls back. “There he is,” the woman says. 

Jonathan starts to move, but the man says, “Easy now, son. Hold still. We’re going to need you to stay still as we get you out of here.” 

Jonathan settles back. The man starts asking him questions, speaking calmly. He answers as best he can while Sarah’s abandoned agony pulses through him. 

After the questions, the medic says, “OK, Jonathan. We’re going to bring something in that will keep you immobile, just as you are. Then we’ll get you out and to the ambulance, OK?” 

“OK,” he says, but the man’s kindness makes it all hit him. Sarah’s grief is cried out in Jonathan’s shattered sobs.  

All Water’s Moments

/ boz bozeman / Leave a comment

Well hello. I’ve been aiming my way back here for a long time. I’m sitting in my Writing Club with middle schoolers who are happily typing away on their own work. I was looking for something to work on when I stumbled upon this poem.

Do you ever have the experience of finding something you wrote long ago, and you say “Hey, wait, this is pretty good”? Well that’s what happened here. I hope you think so, too.

And I hope I’m back. Momentous things may be happening for my writing soon, and I’d love to share them with your!

All Water’s Moments

The stream is creating its course as it flows,  
not carving it 
into the rocks and soil; 
it is wearing them down,  
so slowly and quickly 
that it is happening in two  
different  
seconds. 

This stream’s wet pattern is the laying of itself into the silt and stone, 
ever creating and sustaining its path. 
Thus it changes  
always  
now. 

Thus it is creating the pattern of its own tone, 
A tone made up of all its water and of all its moments: 
Its great single sound 
is a mingling of large and small waterfalls,  
spigots, 
ripples, V-shaped like bird migrations, 
spouts and shallows; 
water caught in rock-trap cataracts rasping and splashing, 
water deep bass in shadowed crevices,  
pouring so thick it is both clear and obscuring, 
full flowing into the pool it is ever carving.  

Only the dirt and rock can feel this streams underside, touch its other surface. 
Unless I will lay in it,  
dig myself down so the top of my skin  
is even with the skin of the planet, 
let the stream cover me 
wet me, 
yes, drown me, 

But before that I will feel the sliding of its bottom water 
On top of me. 

But I will not,  
because it is too cold,  
and I would die. 

In the ever-moments I have with this stream, 
It lets me see a little of the slowness 
that is hidden in its rushing, 

All of its flickering frozen moments,  
numberless as stars and pages. 

It slows down only enough to define its slipping away. 
 
And I see it dousing a stone, browning its tan rock skin, 
And I see it part around a boulder, and the sound it makes 
must be that of water tearing. 

I see where the waterfall has caused a spout at its base, 
so some of the water that funnels down  
curves back up 
and reaches its top and comes 
down 

so that splashes  
                         jump  

                                       off   

and I have to think it is playing, the water is playing, because if I follow a splash  
down 
I see it form,  
bend out,  
come apart and arc a diver’s curve,  
and then there are so many others,  
brief splashes,  
about to fall back into the flow,  
and I laugh,  
which is why I think it’s playing,  
because it’s not right to just stand by a stream 
and laugh at water, 
is it? 

And it asks me, 
in its stream language of gurgle and burble and moan,  
and patter and drip,  
Of low boom, 
it asks, “can you see now  
flowing by?” 

and the sound drops back down, and there is the water, thin and fast, and there is Thoreau, of course, he’s always hanging around by the stream, and he says, “now now now now now now now now now now now now now,” until I just about hit him, and I’m about to shout, “I get it!” but he has that look on his face, the one he gets, and you realize that in that man’s mind he is only trying to teach you, and he is taking this seriously, but he also sees the humor in it, and the inherent absurdity, but also the incredible meaningfulness of it all, also that I am beneath his contempt, that we are just humble specks hurtling through space, that we are all one, and we are all separate, and how can you hit all that?  I wouldn’t know where to aim.