A Crash After the Ice Storm on NC Highway 18

It felt like hours had gone by. Or maybe it was days. Months. Years. Really, it wasn't possible to measure time's subjective passage when its objective motion was frozen in place. The white Toyota had hung in mid air forever and for no time at all, wrapped in a cloud of ice and shattered safety glass that glistened white and pink about the frozen pine boughs off the overlook.

Janet stared out the broken windshield. The car was canted to one side, toward Sophie in the passenger seat. She couldn't see her daughter except as peripheral, stalled movement, where her hair was a paused chestnut explosion and her hands weren't quite shielding her face. Inside, the older woman was screaming. Her soul cowered in some safe corner, trying to protect itself from the nightmare she now regretted asking to see. Of course sound and cowering were motion and motion was impossible in this little pocket of reality. Her body remained as it had been, one had at ten and the other half gripping two, all sitting in perfect quiet.

More hours passed. More time without time. As soon as Janet's mind was able to step into more open spaces, she found the Voice whispering to her again without words.

Have you decided yet?

Silence wasn't a yes, but Janet knew the thing understood that it also wasn't a no. It had just shown her...well, Hell wasn't the right word for it, but it was close enough. There was no Hell and there was no Heaven. Only that ancient abyss that waited for either her or Sophie after the car was again set free to trace its inevitable arc to the forest floor, fully eighty feet below the roadway. An infinite gulf of fire that gave heat but no light. Stinking, burning, worm-bitten dark, where life after death lasted an eternity in a moment and stretched out across an endless expanse of years.

Either. Or. There was a choice that wasn't really a choice laid out before her eyes. The Voice knew human nature, and it understood the depths of fear and pain. It had been born from them, and it drank them like a thirsty man in the desert given a glass of cold water.

A starving animal will eat its own child. Or its own mother. Despite the lies that Janet told herself, the nonsense reasons that she used to justify the request, she knew that she had asked to see the world that creature had warned her of in order to make an already determined course of action easier to take. To eat what had been set in front of her.

But still, she hesitated. Hesitation wasn't deliberation. It was simply a delay of action. A potentially fatal delay, and maybe a suicidal one. A way to choose the humanly impossible by not choosing at all, to worldlessly select death and, in the selection, to be damned in her own child's place.

Maybe.

The memory faded, too intolerable to hold onto. First it was only the sharp and immediate sting that died away, then the vision gradually became uncertain, swallowed up in that long forever. Had it really happened? Had such a thing been possible? No, Janet would have been sure of something like that. After she had rejected the thought, it was a small thing to forget the rejection as long ages passed without actually passing.

Ahead of the car, a ribbon of sunlight marked the Eastern horizon. The full light of day lay behind, a destination that the car moved always toward but could never reach. The hungry Voice lurked in the mind of its two stalled passengers, and while they decided who it should feed on, it ate its fill of both.