Roadside Memorial | Saylor Skidds
She was driving down a gravel road. And you passed under a single flickering streetlight. And her hair was so red, the orange made it flash at you. It burned out your retinas one cone at a time while you were waking up. Somehow the orange and red were loud and brassy, like the worst kind of alarm clock. Like an air raid siren or the lights on an ambulance. She reached down and nudged your t-shirt, prodding you with her finger three times, while keeping her eyes on the road.
“Wake up, please.” She said, “It’s morning.”
“Are we almost there?” You asked.
“I don’t know.”
You sat up. You could feel the grinding of the gravel under the tires. The thing that had woken you up before the bright lights of the streetlamp, her hair and the sun, which you could now see was protruding out from the ends of the trees around you, was a large, bumpy rock the car had just passed over. That and the small, pointy pebbles you were passing over had started a series of quiet grinding sounds from the bottom side of the car. That couldn’t have been good, you had thought. But now wasn’t the time to ask.
“What does that mean, you don’t know?” You prod.
“I’m just not sure.” She was reaching down now, grabbing a bottle of water. There were only two left in the case, you noticed. And then she was holding it out to you. She smelled like a bizarre mix of iced tea and gasoline. When her mouth hit your ear, you wondered briefly if she would still remember your name. It had been so long since you last spoke, how could you have known?
“Laura, drink this. We won’t be able to stop for a while.”
You twist the cap open, the water is lukewarm by this point, but there was nothing left either of you could do about it. That car only had two air conditioning vents, one by the radio and one by the steering wheel. It was ridiculous, what else could you do? What else could either of you do?
“Are we at least close to the river? You said we have to pass that river to get to his house, right?”
“Probably? Check the map.” She had to raise her voice slightly. You heard the grinding noises from underneath the car getting louder. There was also a faint popping sound. You grabbed the map from the place you had folded it up on the dashboard last night. You flipped it upside down. Caitlin had circled Levi’s house in a blue pen at the start of the drive. You traced it with your finger and followed the road out from the house down to the river. It was a mess of interlocking tiny red, yellow and even more blue lines. It looked like your aunt’s varicose veins before her surgery. It looked like the cables on the inside of your old TV. “What’s the name of this road?” You asked Caitlin.
“I don’t know, okay?” She responded. “Why are you asking so many questions all of a sudden? This is just how TJ said the directions to me.” Her hands gripped tighter on the steering wheel. The grinding continued, and you could hear the scraping of metal against the rocky ground. Still, you didn’t want to mention it.
“When did you and TJ last talk about this?” You spoke.
“Four, five months? I don’t know!” She slapped her hands against the wheel. The car twisted slightly towards the trees to the right of the road. The grinding continued, and you could feel that something had shifted, that something was off. Somehow, Caitlin’s seat looked a good six inches higher than it needed to be. And your view out of the passenger window had dropped much, much closer to the ground. Still, you didn’t say anything. Why didn’t you say anything? Idiot. You were such an idiot.
“Do you have a better idea of where we should be? For all we know, we’re still going the right way!” She continued, but her voice was wavering. You could tell she didn’t know where she was going, she didn’t know if this road was a dead end. There were no houses anywhere, just a few of the flickering streetlights that had woken you up before. They were dimming now; the sun was rising higher and higher over the tops of the trees. You could hear birds in the bushes now, too.
“No.” You replied. “I’m not sure how to read the map,”
“Then be quiet and drink your water.”
You both stopped talking for a few minutes. You heard the wind in the trees, fewer crickets and more birds as the car rolled down the road. Once Caitlin had stopped talking, she relaxed her hands and her posture. When you turned, you could see her muttering to herself, something you couldn’t quite make out. Something about stupid plans, a bad idea. Something about the road and the state of the car, and what Casey and Levi would think about all this. She was right. In your heart of hearts, you knew that she was right. This was a terrible idea. This trip was a horrible plan. Neither of you had even thought the concept through that much, to be honest. And you were worried, too. You were so young. And you were so tired. And what was Levi going to think if Caitlin drove up to his house for the first week of her college semester and she told him she would have to take care of her stupid, stupidly curious little sister.
Once Caitlin had quieted down, her eyes widened. Now she could hear the grinding noises, and the scrapings of plastic and metal against stone. There was also the bouncing of small pebbles. Had something gotten inside of a pipe? You couldn’t tell. Neither could she.
“Shit.” She muttered. “That was a pretty big bump just then. What is going on?” The car had begun to slow down. She pressed her right foot down on the gas pedal harder, but the speed barely increased.
And then you saw headlights. And heard the honking of a horn. Someone moving at a much faster speed coming down the very small road directly at you. Caitlin was screaming. You were completely silent. Dragging and pulling the steering wheel as hard as she could, she swerved off of the road, missing a tree and stopping in a patch of grass against a large rock. You heard a thud, something on the bumper was going to be dented. Caitlin swore again, and you both got out of the car.
“So, sorry, ma’am.” A woman was stepping out of the other car, which had stopped on the road and was walking toward Caitlin. An older man climbed out of the driver’s seat and followed her towards your car.. “My husband hit a bump in the gravel and lost control of the vehicle, briefly. Are you both all right?”
Caitlin was standing at the back of the car, observing the exhaust pipe and the way the car was gradually elevated on one side. She gave a thumbs up to the woman and circled around the car. The old woman stood there, and she and her husband continued to chatter at and with Caitlin. You couldn’t hear much of it. It faded into a dull monotone as you walked towards the woods.
It was late summer, everything still had leaves. The cover was thick, it made the forest seem cramped, almost claustrophobic, so much more than it was in actuality. Only small rays of the now risen sun peeked through the thick cover. The trees were old, thick with twisting branches. Some were covered in hairy vines of poison ivy, some sported bulbous growths on the trunks that showed signs of deeper-rooted sicknesses and infestation.
You walked towards the one closest to where the car had stopped. There was a small white wooden cross erected at the bottom, a wreath of desiccated white roses and lilies resting on top of it. It was a roadside memorial. You wondered what kind of crash it had been, and how long ago it had happened. The cross gave no information except the name Emily painted across in blue calligraphy that must have once been gorgeous but was now peeling so much that the L was almost completely gone. You saw other memorabilia around the cross, too. Somehow you knew that the items were not connected to each other. There were splintering pieces of glass, the bottom half of a picture frame, and a young boy’s face on a scrap of paper pinned under the wood. There was a small bouquet of very old, dry chrysanthemums, a couple of dark red roses sprinkled throughout. You saw some water soaked pieces of paper, the remains of a letter written on them soaked beyond legibility. And there were two stuffed animals, a small rabbit and a replica of a dove with one of the wings ripped off.
“Laura?” Caitlin called out to you. The monotone had stopped; the couple must have driven oƯ already. “What are you doing? The car is mostly fine; we can keep going for a bit.”
You didn’t answer. You stepped closer to the tree. There was a small dark hole at the bottom of the tree, where the roots spread out around the memorial in a fan. You crouched, moving closer to it. You thought you could see the flash of the light against something reflective. “Laura? Let’s go!”
“Laura?”
“Laura!”
You stumbled on one of the thicker tree roots. You felt them twisting around you, like long, tapering fingers. One curled in on itself, like a rope, grabbing you by the ankle and pulling you down. You hit your chin when you hit the ground, biting your tongue hard. Blood filled your mouth and trickled down your lips. Another root grabbed two of your hands. You couldn’t prop yourself up anymore. You felt dirt against your skin as you were dragged closer to the hole behind the memorial, the direction had pulled up your shirt. You spit out a tooth and began to flail your free leg, trying to grab hold onto something, anything vertical to stop the slide. So much blood filled your mouth, you tried to scream, but there was only a bubble. And then you saw nothing. You saw nothing, you couldn’t make a sound. You heard Caitlin call your name one time before your hearing was cut off. You felt the scraping of thorns against your ankles and the dampness of more blood against dirt. You brushed against something smooth, something with hair and limbs and eyes and nails, and briefly realized it was a human body—Emily?—before dirt covered your face, filling your nose and mouth, piling up in your lungs and pressing down on your ribcage. You could feel the cloth of shirts against your toes, a tangled mass of hair not far off. The bitter, acidic black soil filled your throat, pressing down on your esophagus like a rock. You could feel an undulating, small strip of flesh pulsating in your throat. Dirt mixed with blood on your lacerated ankles as the wounds began to clot, and the dirt was in your skin, and the dirt was in the bloodstream now. Your ears were filled with soil, a beetle burrowed itself in your left eardrum that you had not noticed. But then you couldn’t even feel the blood against the soil or the dirt in your lungs or the place where your hand was against a human arm, and at that point you were gone.
Saylor Skidds is an English major at UAlbany from Rhode Island. This is their first time being published in ARCH. In their free time Saylor enjoys reading, sewing, and volunteering at the library.