It started with a deafening crash, the crunching and scraping of metal like an aluminum can in a trash compactor. Then came the screaming.
“My God, I recognize that car, so.”
“I think it’s Lizzie – Lizzie and her youngest son…”
“Somebody call 999!”
It was a small town, you see. Things like this didn’t happen very often, and when they did the whole place erupted into a chaos that would’ve been somewhat exciting if everyone didn’t directly and intimately know the people involved.
First the ambulance arrived, then the town’s lone fire truck from the volunteer station up the road and around the bend, with the Garda in the rear.
“Will they be alright?” people begged of the Garda as they were gently shunted back onto the sidewalks, but looking at the car (if you could still call it that), it was quite clear that they wouldn’t be alright. One of them, anyway.
Meanwhile, the eldest son – the one who should’ve gone but sent his brother along instead because he had entirely too much to do at home, sorry – was in his bedroom, tucking socks and t-shirts into a large suitcase lying open like a book on his bed (even though his mother always said this was disgusting and would get “airplane germs” into his sheets) while bobbing his head to the beat of a rock song turned up criminally loud, preparing for his first-ever voyage across the ocean. He’d never been more excited for something in his life, not even when he and his best friend Alastair played on stage for the first time, he on the guitar and the other boy on the fiddle.
America, he thought with a sort of feverish reverence, would be a fresh start. The start of everything. And in spite of what was unfolding across town at that very moment, or perhaps because of it, he would still go. He had to.
But the funeral would come first, where he would embarrass himself by getting blackout drunk and fleeing the gravesite to vomit under the cover of a willow tree’s weeping branches.
Whether he will ever forgive himself for it – for any of it – is yet to be determined.
Monica Skibbie holds an MA in Literature from Northwestern University and a BA in English & American Literature from NYU. A lifelong reader and writer, she lives in Chicago and can usually be found with a book in one hand and a long-since-gone-cold cup of tea in the other.