500 words a day

614 words 6th March 2010

He slammed forward as the brakes screeched and the car started to skew to the middle of the road. From the back of the car he felt himself moving alongside and then ahead of Jim and Hannah in the front. Hannah’s mouth was open but as time slowed down he couldn’t hear what she was saying, just an incoherent roar. He noticed her eyes pointing ahead and slowly he turned his heavy head in that direction, and he saw the approaching lamppost. It looked at first as if the whole car might just miss. He kept trying to calculate as the car skewed around and was moving in a trajectory that took it away from the lamppost centimetre by centimetre. Was there enough of a distance between the car and lamppost to enable the sideways skewing to pull them safely clear of it, then all they’d face was the grassy field beyond. He knew even the field would be a challenge. Hitting it sideways on they were certain to overturn, many times and he began to imagine how that would feel and how he could prepare or brace himself. He slowly leaned forward but too slowly to grab hold of the seat in front before the car reached the point of impact. He cold see his progress towards the seat and the belt he planned to grip as a dotted line alongside the slightly faster moving dotted line of the car, moving towards the other side of the road. Across that traverse the two dotted lines was a further red line which plotted, on the mental graph that appeared in the space around him in the car, the sideways movement away from the lamppost n relation to their travel forward straight at the lamppost. He couldn’t see the graph’s ending, it was developing with their lazy twisting motion but it looked as if it would be incredibly close. If he were a betting man, and let’s face he was, he would bet on anything. If they had this kind of thing in betting shops, a graph to show all the possibilities around a impending car crash, he’d spend a fortune and not win that much probably, despite his constant belief that this was his lucky time. If he was in that betting shop right now and able to bet he would predict two things, one they would just miss the lamppost, but sadly he wouldn’t get to grab the seat or seatbelt before the car hit the kerb and started to flip and roll into the field which meant he would be shaken around inside with no means of restraint, obviously he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, in the back it still seemed wrong, so his chances of survival were low. He thought further in terms of odds, chances of death not that high, chances of injury and permanent disablement, pretty high, chance of pain and broken limbs and injuries that would be awful but eventually heal, virtually certain, that would be the one to  put all the money on, the house, the car the savings, because the odds would be low but the chances of failure were virtually impossible.





Still he remembered thinking that before and losing all of his Nan’s savings on a dead cert so maybe he’d be wrong this time and for once he’d benefit, he saw the lamppost just miss them and as they hit the kerb and went first up and then over for the first roll, his hand, which was approximately 2 mm away from the seatbelt was wrenched in another direction and he guessed the dead cert was going to hurt him again, worse than ever before.








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Steve Wybourn





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