Speculative Drama

corpseonpumpkin:

When the ambulance sirens died off past the distant corner over the Bloodbank Hill and everyone had for the most part drifted off to discuss the accident, I sat cross-legged on the sidewalk, slumped down next to the spatters of blood and pools of blood still left behind, and I pushed at the blood with my finger and pulled off congealed pieces that could even in this early stage be scraped away from the asphalt. I put some of it in my mouth, imagining it was hers and hers alone. But there was no way to tell, because there were three people in all, and all of them had been bloodied and broken from the crash. I sat in the empty round smashed part of the shrubs where the vehicle had finally crashed after pounding through the pedestrian triad of her company, resting within that ghostly indenture with my head nestled against a snapped root, staring at the stars already starting to show in the twilight atmosphere, imagining constellations there since I could never quite figure out the real ones ever. I’d scraped so much blood from the sidewalk that I lay chewing my fingers indefinitely, scraping blood out from beneath the nails, presuming with a quiet hopefulness that it was hers and hers alone. And in the morning I would visit her in the hospital and, even though I’m just a customer where she works and she doesn’t know me in real life, I’ll tell her how beautiful she is. And if she’s fucked up from the pain and the surgery and the drugs, she won’t find it strange that I’ll refuse to leave until I’m dragged out of the hospital. When she suffered a brush with death, I suffered the shame of never having asked her out on a date. And fittingly, to make good on my faith in her and that we were meant to coincide somehow in this life, in the morning I would apply for her position at the bakery and, if I got the job, would walk in her footsteps, imagining the course she would have so taken through the fine white snowfield cement floor of sugar and flour so typical behind the scenes at a proper bakery.