Broken Glass

I’m writing this at the request of my friend. These events happened years ago, but I still think of it constantly. She feels that my writing about this will help me see it as what it was, just horrible coincidence….

As I said, it happened years ago. I was a senior in high school, and taking a dual-enrollment class at the local community college. It was advanced creative writing and I was enjoying it immensely. The professor was much more interesting than any of my high school teachers, and was truly interested in forcing us to be imaginative, and actually learn how to catch an audience’s attention. I was rather horrible at it, but like most teenagers, was rather oblivious to the obnoxiousness of my writing.

In any event, the professor had announced a rather interesting idea as our mid-term project. He was going to carry a bag around to each student. The bag would be full of tiny slips of paper, each with one word on them. We were each to pick out four words, announcing them as we did, and to write the words down. We would then return the words to the bag, the professor would stir the bag slightly, and then the next student would draw their four words. These fours words would be the subject of our mid-term project, which was due in one month. The goal was to write a short story of at least 1250 words, or a long poem of at least 400 words, about those four words. The four words must have equal importance in the story, and any reader should be able to pick out those four words as the major words in the plot.

As the other students picked out their words, I felt more and more nervous about how in God’s green earth we were supposed to accomplish this feat. One student, a girl named Suzy, pulled out “Run Baby House Horse”. James, who was slowly becoming a friend of mine, got “Skyscraper Goat Clock Astronaut”. All the other students seemed to have equally ridiculous combinations of words. As I sat in the back corner, I was one of the last students to pick. Praying I would get something that made sense, I pulled my words, pausing in between to write them down.

Broken

Glass

Equals

Death

At the last word I felt all the hair along my arms stand up. Prof. Jacobs looked down at my desk, where the slips of paper were lying with a slightly confused expression, but then smiled. “I should take you to Las Vegas with me”, while the rest of the class started teasing that I should redraw as it wasn’t fair I got an intelligible sentence instead of pure nonsense. As I put the words back in the bag, the professor asked if I did want to redraw. I almost said yes. Almost, almost. Wishes, wishes. Instead I said “No, I drew these. I can work with them”. As the last three students drew their words I continued to stare at my sentence. I ended up being the only one who drew a logical phrase. As the class ended most the others made comments about how lucky I was. I could easily write a horror story out of those words. And I wanted to agree and feel elated that I would have an easy assignment. But the hairs on my arms had as of yet refused to go down. Walking next to James on the way out, he saw my face and told me I could have gotten worse. “Broken baby equals death”, “Death cuts baby goat”, or “Baby Bread Mountain Goat”. Someone had actually got that last one and it made me laugh.

Over the next few weeks I worked on my story. I decided to write a short story about a nerd teenager who was teased and ridiculed and eventually committed suicide by breaking a bottle, and using the glass to slit her wrists. And while writing the story I didn’t feel even slightly worried about the four words I choose or the grim subject matter. It was out and about with my life that I felt out of sorts; mostly around glass.

My younger twin sisters were chasing each other around the house one afternoon a couple days after I choose my words and nearly broke a vase my mom had placed on the hallway table. I chewed them out for over ten minutes about being more careful before my mom came and told me to chill out. The next night, after almost dropping my water glass on the way to the dinner table, I switched to using only plastic cups. I even started asking for us to use only plastic ware at dinner, not the stone ware plates, just to be safe. My mother thought I was crazy but went with it. The girls liked the plastic better anyway, and it always cleaned well in the dishwasher.

I didn’t believe I was obsessing or worrying, just told myself I was being cautious. But I was constantly vigilante around glass. My friends started to notice it too. They asked me why I was suddenly scared to go to the abandoned park we liked to hang out it. I couldn’t tell them it was because it always had empty beer bottles scattered around, and I didn’t want to risk one breaking.

My friends also noticed I was tired all the time. I wasn’t sleeping well. Within a few days of choosing my words, I started to dream about broken glass. Nothing overly scary; I didn’t dream of the girl I was writing about cutting herself. Nor did I have dreams similar to the scenes you see in movies with the glass slicing the heroes as some explosion blast a window to shards. No my dreams were much simpler. A narrow walkway, or path, would be glittering beautifully in the sunlight. The sunlight would be reflected in a dazzling display from the path, like you might image a fairy sidewalk to look. By then my stomach would start to sink, and in the dream I would know something was drastically wrong. It would be then I would wake up, shaking and nervous about how all that glass ended up along that narrow path. It was a lot of glass.

Two or three times a night I would have that dream, and each time I would wake up feeling nervous. Feeling dreadful. I never truly understood what that word meant until those dreams started. Dread. I would dread the idea of seeing broken glass anywhere. But as the sun came up and the day started, I always calmed down slightly. It was just a dream. It wasn’t anything to worry about. The words I choose meant nothing. And why am I being so freaked out about that dream. It was beautiful, nothing wrong in the dream, just a path with glass on it. No blood even. Nothing creepy, nothing sinister. Just a feeling. A bad feeling, nothing more.

These are the thoughts I would tell myself over the next few weeks. Again and again. I could almost function normally during the day, unless I was being overly aware of the glass around me. I started driving my old, old Lincoln around with all the windows rolled down. Or walking.

It was three days before the story was due that it happened. I had finished the story the night before and was ready to turn it in. I was assuming once I turned it in and got my grade back I would be better able to get over my new fear of glass. I was driving home from school when someone tripped on a curb. I saw them trip, and flailing around, their bottle falling from their hands. It was going to fall and break right in front of my car. Or on it.

I quickly slammed the breaks. A car honked behind me but didn’t hit me. In that same instant a bus ran the light not twenty feet in front of me. I watched in amazement as another car was smashed by the bus. The bus tilted to the side and fell. Screaming filled the air. I stared at all the broken glass. It wasn’t beautiful; it was horrifying. Large sections of jagged glass were scattered around the road. I sat in my car as others got out trying to assist people. They must not have been far off, because police and ambulances showed up very quickly. The man who had been in the car behind me asked me if I was alright. I realized I was sobbing. He told me to hang tight; that a kid shouldn’t see this. A cop came over and asked me how I knew to stop. “A guardian angel must have warned you” he said.

And that’s when I felt all the weight lift. This is what the message had meant! If I hadn’t had been afraid of a little bit of broken glass I would have been killed! Even with all the pain around me, I felt relieved. All the worry the last month had been to save my life. I said “thank you” to God over and over again. Eventually it became clear that miraculously no one had died, even the driver of the car was alive, though in critical shape at the time. The police told me I was free to go, and I turned around and took an alternate route home. I decided I was going to go back to using glass.

As I pulled into my driveway, I heard the TV blasting. One of my sisters had hearing problems, and hated wearing her hearing aid when she could avoid it. I smiled at that. I was going to apologize for chewing them out. And I was going to get sleep tonight! I was almost skipping as I grabbed my backpack from the car. I got to the edge of the house, to follow the walkway around past our living room windows to the front door. That’s when I noticed it; our narrow path, glittering beautifully in the late afternoon sun.