Drift Away

by Jenny Morelli

Another late work night has me driving home way past my bedtime and I’m finding it hard to keep my eyes open.

I keep drifting off and wondering whodunit in the book I’m reading, which is right now splayed out on the passenger seat. I’m lost in thought as the miles tick by when my nightmare introduces itself, pounding my car with a wind-whipping storm. I struggle to find the lane lines to avoid drifting into other cars. To calm myself, I reach for a wedge of my snack-portioned apple from my vintage Snoopy backpack and crunch-crunch-crunch to the beat of the hard-working windshield wipers as my car slips and sloshes slowly up the bridge.

I’m soon funneled into a merging lane as blinding-bright flashing lights redirect traffic away from the crumbling cement wall separating the southbound lanes from northbound. Startled, I overcorrect my steering when a wiper-wand breaks free from my windshield, flying off into the night. Fat raindrops continue with a vengeance sluicing down the glass in hypnotic patterns that draw my attention away from the road.

My biggest fears collide like the bolts of lightning stabbing the ground as I hydroplane into a painfully powerless drift, drift, drift from one lane to the next until there are no more lanes and I’m screeching into the metallic barrier. Careening over the edge of time and space and I’m falling. Freewheeling. Flying.

Before I can register all that’s transpiring, I’m smashing into my steering wheel as my car splashes into the indifferent waters, a white spiderweb appearing and growing and spreading across my windshield. Blood trickles from my forehead into my eyes as a red void presses in around me, sucks me down, swallows me into its abyss, into a great unknown, into a great beyond, and I float, suspended, with Snoopy at my side.

I float and flounder inside my car, pingponging from front to rear, from side to side, as reality pressures in around me, and without a whimper, without a scream, with just the slightest of apple-scented inhales. I close my eyes and embrace the implosion. Let the briny blanket of the sea cocoon me as the book I’d been reading slams into my face. Splays open to the last page, the one that reveals who, in fact, has dunit as I drift away into the deepest annals of time, of space, of oblivion.

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Jenny Morelli is a NJ high school English teacher who lives with her husband, cat, and myriad yard pets. She seeks inspiration in everything and loves to spin fantastically weird tales. She’s published in several print and online literary magazines including Spillwords, Red Rose Thorns, Scars tv, Bottlecap Press and Bookleaf Press for four poetry chapbooks. Website: JennyMorelliWrites.com