It was
early enough yet for the breaking day to be attaining whatever solidity and hue
its own nascent sunlight might afford.
To
those few people within earshot of the train station at such an hour the
crescendo of car engine could only herald misfortune, confirmed when the actual
vehicle came in sight, hurtling across the taxi rank and pavement at such speed
and with such lunatic disinterest as to pass within mere inches of a woman
stood cabside paying her fare, her fingers instinctively tightening at the
falling coins.
The
car crumpled upon impact with the building, the momentarily audible implosion
leaving absolute stillness in its wake, emptying even birdsong from out the
dawn air.
Tiny
fragments of shattered window lay fanned out on either side of the vehicle
glittering with a strange geometric symmetry; from above it might have appeared
as though something iridescently winged had flown directly into the wall and
collapsed of its injuries.
The
station staff, the commuters, the standing taxi drivers and their few paid
fares: it was as if they had between them drawn and held just one breath, the
fateful motorist rendered evident to their mute collective witness by that
absence of glass, his actual features masked in the severity of their damage
and the blood upon his face both in motion and at rest.
His
own last shallow inhalations contained the residue of hospital antisepsis and
hair tonic, tainted with something immediately caustic and the recognisably
corrosive taste of blood thickening above his throat.
Conscious
too of each pulse that leapt yet beneath the skin of his trigger finger, but
utterly unaware of being epicentral to the state of narcosis descended upon all
those within whose sight he now sat dying, he finally surrendered to the sudden
quiet and comforting warmth by which he felt himself enveloped.
It
was in knowing he had been unstoppable within those moments ordained him that
he found his own forgiveness, as resigned to the inevitable outcome as his wife
without comprehension of the woman herself as either wife or mother to his
surviving child, but rather registered upon his perception as simple mental and
physical impediment, a souring of the requisite dynamic he had come this
morning to consolidate.
All
other deaths he discounted as incidental, elementary footnotes in his purge of
conceived flaw, and such had been his preoccupation when the car crashed into
the station buildings.
Though
his body appeared unchanged by its final breath, still like one spring
unwinding into another its release seemed to upset some equilibrium in the
surrounding air, prompting the bystanders themselves to exhale and consciously
breathe again.
With
the diffuse pressure allowing sound back inside the ruptured vacuum, the woman
clutching her money came again aware of the taxi’s idling engine, remarked too
the sudden absence of her young daughter, momentarily forgotten and now nowhere
to be seen. When she recognised what remained of the child’s toy suitcase and
its bright content spilled amongst the accident debris, her head seemed to
become snatched about in an erratic puppetry as if wilfully fighting
confrontation with what she feared would be revealed her.
The
first cry that left her lacked breath, cut off incomplete before even
consciously formed and each one subsequent the same, an unrelenting howl that
erupted beyond hearing after only that briefest awful noise with which her
throat could cope, over and over while between the buckled car and building
wall each visible finger of the tiny raised hand began to turn colour as she
watched.
