SHORT STORIES : Fictional Reality

1

Carrie Newton’s eyes widened in horror and her mouth hung agape as she watched, frozen in place, as her son ran out into the street after his tennis ball. “Jason, get back here!” she cried frantically, but the boy paid her no heed.

The oncoming SUV blared its horn as breaks squealed shrilly and the tires screamed over the blacktop. Jason stopped in his tracks as the tennis ball continued to roll from his grasp and eventually rebounded off the curb on the other side of the street. Once more the SUV blared its horn, and Jason tried to run out of the way of the oncoming vehicle. At the last minute, the SUV tried veered to the side, but it was too late.

“Jason!” Carrie cried again, as tears streamed down her face.

There was a loud crunch of denting metal and shattering bones as the fender of the SUV met Jason’s head and shattered his skull while the bumper demolished his ribs at the same time. The boy’s neck whipped his head to the side as his face smashed against the grill of the front of the SUV, breaking it open with an explosion of blood that was like a dark liquid supernova, spraying scarlet droplets into the air as a fluid purple shroud flashed briefly in a heavy spatter within the dusky atmosphere. Jason’s body was thrown forward upon impact, his arms and legs flailing, whipping and flitting back as his body flew through the air only to crash and lay sprawled over the residential road. As the blood continued to spurt heavily from his forehead, brains leaked through the jagged crevice of his fractured skull and he looked up at the setting sun through glassy eyes, lying still except for the steady twitching of his legs, the final movements of his dying nerves.

“Jason!” Carrie cried again and could say no more.

She screamed and ran toward her son, passing Jack—Jason’s friend, who had been the one who had thrown the ball too hard, thus resulting in Jason having dropped it when the ball had rolled out into the street in the first place. Jack stood there, trembling, confused, and afraid, his eyes now transfixed at the sight of Jason’s corpse, lying crumpled, bleeding, and broken by the side of the curb.

Carrie could feel the perfect life she had worked so hard for shattering to pieces as she ran frantically to her dying son. In her youth, having a child had been the last thing she had wanted, and if someone were to tell her in her late teens to early twenties that she would have made a loving mother as she was now at age twenty-eight, she would have laughed hysterically at them. Yet while she hadn’t been happy throughout her pregnancy, she somehow immediately fell in love with Jason when he had been born and she held the infant in her arms. She looked upon Jason as any mother would look over her newborn baby, with love and affection for that which she had created, as well as the final piece she needed for her redemption and salvation from all that had happened and all she had done in the past. Through the years she had given everything she could to Jason, to make her son happy and watched in wonderment as the boy grew, cherishing every moment.

Yet now her precious dream life was over.

Carrie’s mouth quivered and hung open as she fell to her knees and held her boy, cradling Jason in her arms. She cringed with terror because she could swear she could almost hear the boy’s broken ribs grinding painfully together as the jagged bones rake and puncture against his internal organs. Jason’s head hung limply over his mother’s arms and his face was a mask of blood. In the sky above, the setting sun glinted radiantly off his strawberry blond hair as tufts clung in disarray over his bleeding scalp. The blood and gray matter quickly filled his hair, staining it a deep crimson. The flesh over his left cheek and brow clung like tattered cloth over his perforated skull, which now gleamed brightly in the light of the setting sun. Jason’s mouth opened and closed ever so slightly, and then hung ajar as he gazed up at his mother with a blank, empty, glassy stare.

“Medics!” Carrie screamed shrilly and desperately, yet knew in her heart that it was too late. “For the love of God, please, someone call an ambulance! My son’s been hit; he needs help!” And then her pleas were cut off as she sobbed and cried uncontrollably, her eyes squeezed shut as she threw her head back and screamed loudly into the darkening sky, pressing Jason’s blood-streaked face tightly against her bosom.

“Jesus Christ, what’ve I done?” someone murmured from behind, aghast.

Carrie looked behind to see who it was and saw seventeen-year-old Ivan Cleveland stumbling quickly out of the SUV, his legs buckling and threatening to collapse under his weight, his arms swinging and his head lolling over his shoulders. His face whitened, growing gaunt as his mouth dropped open and his eyes widened. He stood motionless for what seemed an eternity, and then fell to his hands and knees and vomited profusely.

“You killed my son, you son of a bitch!” Carrie screamed angrily and sobbed as she clutched Jason even tighter. She murmured softly, yet her voice remained filled with hate and anguished over what had just happened, what Ivan Cleveland had taken from her: “You killed my Jason.”

 

Carrie laid in the darkness of her bedroom, next to her husband of six years, Markus, unable to sleep that night. Each time she closed her eyes, she could see it all happening again. She could hear the blaring of Ivan Cleveland’s horn as the SUV squealed to a stop, too little too late. She could hear the crunch of bending metal and shattering bones as the SUV collided with Jason, snuffing his life out and shattering Carrie’s hopes and dreams of watching her boy grow up in one horrifying instant.

The Cleveland family had been nothing more than arrogant rich snobs. William Cleveland—the father, had made it big as a Microsoft programmer, while Martha Cleveland worked in some fancy hair salon owned by her mother, given some bizarre French name that Carrie couldn’t even pronounce. The Cleveland family had been rich and well respected by the community at large, yet they looked down upon the normal folk with their noses held high in the air with the deepest contempt. Those elitist assholes thought they were so much better than everyone else, and for that, Carrie continually hoped and prayed for their fall from grace since she had moved to this suburban neighborhood with her husband Mark six after their marriage six years ago.

From a distance, one might surmise that Carrie had gotten exactly what she had wished for. The Cleveland family had now been taken down a notch and would no longer be admired and worshiped like gods to the rest of the neighborhood. They were no longer perfect beings because their seventeen-year-old son had driven recklessly at over sixty miles per hour down Washington Street—a residential street with a speed limit of twenty miles per hour—and in his negligence had run down a small child. But the fall from grace she wished upon the Cleveland family would have been a humiliation to that family, leaving them in disgrace, but not at the expense of herself or anyone else. What happened today was not what she wanted. A scandal of some kind would have been nice—the shadier the better—but God, please, nothing like this!

“I can’t believe he’s gone,” she murmured in the darkness and buried her face in her hands and cried once more, her fingers digging through her soft hair, along her bangs, as another tear scrolled down her cheek.

To her right, Markus stirred as he buried his face in his pillow, then rose and offered her comfort, saying nothing, as tears filled his eyes once more. Markus had been an accountant and was working late at the office when Jason had been run down. He was a scrawny man with bushy brown hair and thick glasses; perhaps a nerd in his late twenties, but still giving off an err of professionalism and self-control, wearing a neatly groomed suit and tie as he came home from the office.

That display of control quickly disintegrated once he had heard the news of what had happened. His briefcase immediately slipped from his fingers and he stood there, trembling for what seemed like hours, but in fact had only been minutes. His face contorted into a grimace of sorrow as tears welled in his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, to deny what had been told to him, only to have his voice muffled by the impending sobs of his emotional breakdown.

Throughout his life, Markus Newton had always been so calm, rational, and gentle, and most of all in complete control of his emotions. With that came also his fierce loyalty and protectiveness as well as love and warmth he felt toward his family, but living in a peaceful suburban neighborhood in a small town, such protective emotions never needed to be displayed, because the life of his family was never in immediate danger, nor had anyone in any way harassed them or made their lives miserable.

With the news of his son’s death, Markus Newton’s control not only wavered but collapsed altogether. He threw his head back and screamed into the ceiling the way Carrie had screamed when she held Jason’s dead corpse to her bosom, then grabbed the nearest thing available—a lamp resting on the wooden stand near the couch—and hurled it against the wall in a fit of rage, screaming still as the tears flowed freely from his eyes, and watched as the lamp crashed and shattered against the wall.

“I should have done something,” Carrie said now, ruefully, as Markus held her in his arms in their dark bedroom. “The more I think about it, the more I feel that what happened is really my fault. Ivan was the one who ran him down, but maybe if I hadn’t turned away just for a second, I could have stopped Jason from running out in the road like that.”

“There was nothing you could have done,” Markus said softly as he kissed her neck, and then wiped the tears from his own eyes. “I’m upset by this too, but you can’t blame yourself for what happened. You just can’t.”

“But I feel I could’ve done something.” Carrie sniffed, sobbed, and blinked the tears from her eyes. “Maybe I could’ve grabbed him before he ran out in the road, or maybe pushed him out of the way, even if it put me in front of the speeding SUV instead of him. God, I loved Jason more than life itself.” Carrie’s voice grew distorted and she could no longer speak coherently, but said one last thing, before breaking down entirely and crying over her husband’s shoulder: “If there was some way I could’ve traded places so that he could live and I would die, I know I’d do it in an instant.”

 

2

Carrie awoke the next morning still in disbelief over what had happened to her son. She knew it had happened, had seen it with her own eyes yesterday, so it must be true, yet in her heart, she yearned to find out differently.

She was normally not a morning person to begin with and in fact hated waking up in the morning. She went about her morning routine listlessly, like a hotheaded zombie not wanting to be interrupted for anything. Should anyone talk to her, she would respond quietly while hinting (not at all discreetly) that she wanted only to be left alone until she was able to wake up. The shower usually helped fix this a little bit, bringing her out of her doze long enough so that the world didn’t seem so distorted as it had as she woke up to the loud buzzing of her husband’s alarm clock.

Even the shower was not enough to quell the distorted and surreal morning atmosphere today, however. She stepped out of the shower still feeling listless as ever, gazing over her reflection in the bathroom mirror yet cringing in revulsion at what she now saw. Her milky complexion appeared even paler now, pallid in the early morning light as her thin face and lips quivered in the mirror. Her eyes—one blue while the other emerald green—appeared bloodshot and filled with tears once more brimming over as she sobbed quietly and brushed her fingers through her wet golden brown hair, darkened from the hot water that had sprayed her merely five minutes ago.

Before yesterday, she strongly resented the Cleveland family, but never really hated them. She felt in a way intimidated by all they had (which had never really been like Carrie Newton at all), but more importantly she hated the way they flaunted their wealth and accomplishments, living in a five-story mansion while the wife walked around with only the most elegant of radiant jewelry and the husband with his wide-screened TV, while the family drove around in and maintained three SUVs.

Perhaps there was a part of Carrie that spurned jealousy at what the Cleveland family had, but overall she was happy with what she had had and what her husband was able to provide for her and Jason.

The life she led before was much worse, she realized now, with a series of abusive boyfriends and friends she had perpetrated illegal activities with frequently, while on the run from the law. She had been so bad that she had nearly been disowned by her own parents, who had been ashamed at the way she had turned out. Somehow Markus had saved her from all of this when she left her former boyfriend and moved in with him. In time, they moved out of that rougher neighborhood and into this quieter town, hundreds of miles away, to start life over again. For that she was grateful, and even after all these years remained firmly in love with Markus.

And through it all, she remained contemptuous toward the Cleveland family despite Markus’s embarrassment—not for what they had, but for the way they flaunted it and for their elitist, two-faced attitude. But she never hated them until now, and hated them even more knowing that their money would ensure that Ivan Cleveland never got more than a slap on the wrist, perhaps at worst getting a few points taken off his driving record.

Yet most of all right now, she hated herself for having done nothing to save Jason.

 

Carrie sat listlessly, eating Cheerios with blueberries (her usual breakfast), as rays of sunlight poked through like thinning darks through the silken mesh of the drapes on the kitchen window. Early in the morning, the sun normally burned her eyes, but today she was unconcerned and unresponsive, and instead slowly forced each spoonful of cereal into her mouth as visions of Jason’s death replayed again and again through her mind, and through the mind’s eye, she could see her son’s corpse lying still and bleeding heavily in the road as she held him, screaming into the setting sun.

In the background, she thought she could hear tiny footsteps from upstairs—a little boy getting up to go to the bathroom and start the day off at kindergarten. On a couple of occasions she could have sworn she heard boyish laughter coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Carrie half-expected to see Jason walk into the kitchen any second, to see his radiant smile light up through dawn’s early shadows as he ran exuberantly to kiss his mother and get ready for school.

Then she sighed once more as despondency overtook her and she realized Jason was dead now. No longer would she take him to Kindergarten, nor get the chance to watch him get on the bus next year when he would have entered first grade. Carrie wouldn’t get a chance to see Jason grow up, nor would she see his first girlfriend, or watch as he learned to drive, or ever see him off to college, because Jason was dead now, both because of Ivan Cleveland’s dangerous driving and because of her inactivity. She had looked away for only a moment, and then the next thing she saw was her precious son running carelessly into the road, in the charging path of an out-of-control SUV.

Carrie looked ahead at the sound of a ruffling newspaper and saw Markus entering the room dressed in his three-piece charcoal suit and burgundy tie, ready for work. Through his eyes—which looked like poached eggs through his thick glasses—she could see no emotional distress. Markus appeared as though to him this was like any other morning, and there was absolutely nothing wrong at all. He shuffle through the business and technology section of the paper, then put it down on the table before heading off to the pantry to get his Cheerios for breakfast.

“You’re going to work?” Carrie murmured through a half-sob.

“Of course I’m going to work,” he said with a curt grin. “Why wouldn’t I? I’m not sick or anything.”

But our son is dead, she wanted to say, but the words couldn’t seem to reach her lips through the threatening sobs and the building lump in her throat. Our fucking son is dead, and you’re acting like nothing’s the matter? How can you sit there and act like nothing’s wrong?

“Carrie, what’s wrong?” he asked with a puzzled expression.

“You know what’s wrong,”was all she could say, and then closed her eyes.

Her eyes flew open once more at the sound of someone running down the stairs and her heart fluttered rapidly as her mouth dropped open in disbelief. She knew who those footsteps belonged to, yet banished the thought—the cruel hope—from her mind immediately once it threatened to blossom. Her heart leapt within her chest, but she struggled against the growing excitement, for she knew of the eventual heartache it would bring her.

It can’t be, she thought ambivalently. It just can’t be. It’s my imagination torturing me again. I know it!

Yet she wanted desperately to believe this time that it was Jason, back from the dead, alive and well as though nothing had happened to him the previous day. Her wishes were fulfilled as Jason entered the kitchen, dressed in denim shorts and a turquoise tee-shirt. “You forgot to make me breakfast this morning,” he said, frowning adorably.

Carrie blinked in disbelief as tears of joy filled her eyes. Her heart leapt once more as she rejoiced at the sight of her son, sitting down at the kitchen table. It can’t be, she thought, sighing with a mixture of elation and a fear of bitter disappointment. I must be dreaming or hallucinating. There’s no way this is possible. But it feels so real, and I want it to be real so badly.

“You’re alive,” she whispered incoherently, barely moving her lips.

It had to be a dream; there was no other way around it. Carrie imagined herself still sleeping naked next to her husband, her eyes moving rapidly because she was dreaming this dream of her boy being alive. It was a reminder of the dreams she had as an adolescent, living in an urban ghetto and finding money lying on the ground—briefcases full of cash without any owner in sight. It was enough to lift her out of that life of poverty and into some measure of happiness. But in the end, her eyes fluttered open, and she realized it was a dream. The old, hopeless life of her youth was waiting for her, without any cash, or any easy way to dig herself out of her misery.

Yet she thought of Markus, who had in the end rescued her from the life of her youth and all the misery, abuse, and hopelessness it entailed. If nothing else, her youth had taught her to never trust anyone. It seemed as though everyone was out solely for the purpose of stabbing her in the back, including her friends, lovers, and even family—especially her family. Markus had always seemed like a prince in shining armor; her dream-come-true, but still a dream and nothing more. Through the years after her salvation, as she tried to fight for a sense of purpose and happiness with a new loving family, there were times when she doubted the legitimacy of her life. Before, her life had been nothing but hardship and unyielding pain, so happiness seemed like a lie to her, unreal, a fictional reality, if you will. Nothing more than an illusion, however elaborate it might be. Yet despite the occasional bouts of disbelief at her newly found happiness with Markus and later with their beautiful son, Carrie knew in her heart that it was all real—it had to be real.

And seeing Jason alive and well now, despite having watched him die the day before, sure as hell felt real, and Carrie wanted nothing more than to believe that it was.

“Mommy, I’m hungry!” Jason demanded and hammered his forearms on the surface of the table, startling Carrie out of her thoughts. She and Markus both simultaneously darted their eyes in their son’s as the table shook lightly under the force of Jason’s blows. “My stomach’s really growling here.”

“I know, I’ll get it in a minute,” Carrie said, giggling as she rose to her feet. She hurried toward Jason and hugged and kissed the boy fiercely before going to the pantry to prepare his breakfast.

 

After seeing Jason off to school, Carrie sat in the living room, on the phone with Kirsten Holloway—her best friend since she moved into this quiet neighborhood with Markus six years ago. Kirsten had also been the first friend she had ever had who had never betrayed her and had never let her down. Kirsten was the type of friend that Carrie had always seen on TV and in the movies, who she had longed for in her youth, but which always seemed out of reach in the real world. In her youth, her friends were two-faced backstabbers; betraying her while pretending to be worthy of her trust at best, and downright antagonistic at worst. Or perhaps the latter was for the best because at least Carrie knew where they stood and there was no manipulation. Kirsten was different, and as unused to trusting people as Carrie had been, she enjoyed having a friend like Kirsten, whom she could depend on and trust and whom she knew wouldn’t gossip about her embarrassing secrets like everyone else seemed to do.

Yet like the sudden “rebirth” of Jason and like her marriage with Markus, there were times when Carrie’s friendship with Kirsten seemed unreal as well. Surely no real person could be so kind, compassionate, and dependable when it seemed to be human nature to ridicule, judge, and betray one’s fellow human. And certainly there was no such thing as the type of friend who could be trusted and who was always there for you when friends in general were the same vapid backstabbing pieces of scum that strangers were, if not even worse, constantly dragging and holding you down to their level, while turning on you and accusing you of being a sellout if you should achieve even the smallest amount of success, prosperity, or happiness.

Such a good life as Carrie led now seemed at times artificial, the way movies with happy endings seemed artificial, where everything always worked out in the end and everything was packaged in nice gold wrapping paper, tied together with the most beautiful and elegant silver ribbons. Yet such moments of disbelief became less frequent through the passing years, and as Carrie came to accept her salvation as the one true reality, and thus, coming to accepting the happiness that came with it in the end, believing that perhaps joy truly could be possible.

Besides, it was nice having someone she could trust enough to talk about her problems with, and Carrie had a lot on her mind she needed to work out, and knew that perhaps Kirsten could help her out in that regard.

“I know what I saw, Kirsten, and I saw Jason run over by Ivan Cleveland’s SUV,” Carrie explained restlessly, feeling a sob growing in her throat, yet her eyes remained dry somehow. “But I also saw him this morning, alive and well, like nothing happened. I made him breakfast and took him to school, and everything seemed just fine.”

“It was shocking, I know,” Kirsten said, and Carrie could almost see her nodding sympathetically at the other end of the phone. “If something like that happened to Jerry, I’d be just as freaked out about it. It’s in our instincts to worry about our children like that. It was a close call, but Ivan was able to stop just in time, and as scared as Jason was, he’s alive and the boy is fine, though hopefully won’t be running out in the street like that again anytime soon.”

That’s not what happened at all, Carrie wanted to say.

“It’s just like you explained to me last night,” Kirsten finished.

“I don’t remember it happening like that,” Carrie said, shaking her head, and at last tears had fallen from her eyes. She sniffled wetly and sobbed as she blinked the tears from her eyes, but continued to cry and sob.

Once more, she could hear the SUV blare its horn as it tried to stop or to swerve out of the way, but colliding with Jason. Once more, Carrie could see her precious son being mowed down by a giant SUV, his neck whipping his head to the side as his face smashes against the grill of the SUV with an explosion of blood that lights the dusky air like a liquid nova of crimson while Jason is thrown forward by the momentum of the collision and left dead and sprawled over the streets, his face mangled as he lies in a pool of his own blood that seems to expand endlessly.

By the same token, the scenario Kirsten had described seemed just as plausible, with the SUV’s tires burning against the pavement as the breaks screeched to a halt. The tires nearly crush Jason, but the car comes to a complete stop, the fender now a mere two inches away from the boy’s head as the SUV towers over him like a giant who has nearly toppled over, crushing the boy that stood beneath him, but regaining his footing just in the nick of time.

Both scenarios seemed equally real.

“I just don’t know what to believe anymore,” Carrie said, struggling to regain her composure as an errant tear trailed down her cheek.

“You never did like the Cleveland family.”

Carrie was appalled at this, feeling the sting of betrayal now from Kirsten because of what she was implying. There was a sudden sensation of the cold, jagged metal of the tip of a blade sinking quickly into her spine, and then numbness ensued, followed by bitter anger. “No, but I never wanted this to happen!” she snapped defensively. “How could you even imply that I would? Yeah, I wanted them to fall, but not like this, goddamn it!”

“I know, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that,” Kirsten said in a trembling voice, breathing heavily. “I know you wouldn’t want that.” She paused, and Carrie could hear nothing but her loud breathing through the speaker. Then Kirsten went on: “What I meant was that maybe your subconscious fabricated the memory of Ivan running over your son as a means of demonizing them, making them appear to be evil by doing something as horrible as killing a child.”

Carrie blushed as relief filled her. Of course Kirsten couldn’t have implied anything horrible as what Carrie had thought she had done. Kirsten was her friend and could be trusted after all. This was just her applying her new-aged psychological outlook on the situation. With that, Carrie smiled endearingly as she brushed her hand through her hair and wiped the tears from her eyes.

“I guess I should just accept that Jason’s not dead after all,” she said softly, her eyes drifting along the walls and ceiling of her living room as she pressed the phone tightly against her ear. “I want to believe that he’s alive, and I have every right to. I saw him, after all. And even though I remember seeing him dead, I have to keep telling myself that’s not what really happened.” Carrie paused with a sigh of relief. “Yeah, I guess reality isn’t so cruel after all.”

She smiled in wonderment and closed her eyes.

 

3

When she opened her eyes again, Carrie found herself walking slowly down a white corridor. It took a few minutes for it to register, but Carrie realized instinctively where she was; she was in a hospital somewhere. The walls were a bland white as the sun shined, glaring through the windows. She glimpsed through the windows long enough to realize that she was on the forth story of the building. From a distance behind, she could hear the dull drone of the motor as a wheelchair carried a man down the corridor to the other end.

Walking beside her was a man who looked eerily familiar, yet an older version of the man she had known in her youth. A man she hadn’t seen in seven years. He was older now, his muscles bulkier. The tattoo on his arm of a Colt .357 lying in a pool of blood was familiar, though faded now and little more than a watermark over his hairy arms. He wore his leather vest, along with a tattered white tee-shirt that left his navel and sagging beer belly exposed, and his denim pants remained stained deeply in beer, blood, and vomit. His bloodshot eyes remained locked in an intense gaze, ready and just looking for the next fight as they veered toward the left and to the right, walking down the corridor. His hair was sallow, with a bald spot on the top, but otherwise draping thickly over the rest of his head, spilling down to his shoulders in lanky tufts, while his long, scraggly beard split halfway like a forked tongue.

Oh my God, it’s Steve Edwards, Carrie realized with daunting horror. Known by the fierce diminutive “Homicide” by his friends, Edwards had been the last of Carrie’s abusive boyfriends, but also the worst. But he should be dead, Carrie told herself, once more in disbelief of what she had been seeing.

 

Carrie’s mind drifted back to that warm summer’s night in August 1997. A full moon glinted in the night sky as the stars glistened brightly, specks of light from billions of light years away, long ago extinguished just like any hope within her heart that she would rise above the useless, parasitic fodder of her environment.

Steve “Homicide” Edwards was younger, his muscles firmer, while his beer gut not yet sagging. His lanky hair still hung below his shoulder blades, but his beard wasn’t yet as pronounced, nor was his balding pate quite as distinguishable. He staggered drunkenly as he leaned over Carrie for support, his arm loosely around the back of her neck, over her shoulder. Homicide reeked of booze, weed, piss, and vomit after having puked all over himself in the bathroom and then when urinating, lost control of his penis and sprayed piss all over himself. Carrie cringed as she wrinkled her nose in disgust, feeling defeated as she helped his smelly boyfriend to the car.

Carrie hated Edwards, despised and feared him, but at this point, her feelings mattered very little to her. Her eyes were jaded to the harsh realities of the world and an emotion was merely a liability, so she pushed her feelings away, ignored them until she could barely notice them anymore. Hope, compassion, and love were buried within layers of darkness, but so was sorrow and tragedy locked away in her hardened shell of apathy.

As they walked through the darkened, though somewhat crowded parking lot, Homicide’s eyes darted left and right as his head lolled loosely over his neck. His eyes locked to the left as he saw a man by his Pickup, putting the key into the lock on the driver’s side door to get it open. Homicide came to a halt immediately as his body stiffened at the sight of the man, who appeared to be in his late twenties, with a receding hairline, but still possessing boyish good looks and a firm build.

“What’re you doing?” Carrie asked, perplexed.

“Tha’ piece’a shit is check’n y’out,” Homicide barked, balling his hands into tightly clenched fists.

Carrie shook her head frantically. “No he’s not. He’s not even looking in this direction. He’s just trying to open his car. Let’s go, Steve.”

Homicide ignored this, however, and instead approached the man by his pickup. Sweat secreted in buckets down his brow as the veins in his neck and arms pulsated hotly. Homicide fished in his denim pockets and pulled out a switchblade. The moonlight glinted briefly and dully against the burgundy hilt of the switchblade, before the blade popped out like grinding metal, dull and corroding with a layer of rust blanketing what was once lustrous chrome.

“Goddamn it, Steve, lets go!” Carrie cried with a sense of frantic urgency.

For years—perhaps since she had shortly begun puberty so long ago—Carrie had suppressed her emotions deep within the darkened confines of her subconscious, never dwelling too long, but instead bottling up the pain that had built up since the day she was born, turning it off essentially so she wouldn’t have to think about it. Without the thought of how abysmal life could be, there was no anguish; she merely drifted along in an apathetic haze, seemingly indifferent to everything around her.

Her shell had broken now, shattered the second Homicide had drawn his switchblade, and her apathy was replaced now by a growing sense of dread as the fear dawned on her, followed by disbelief for what she was about to witness. Through all the pain and hardships she had endured throughout her harsh reality, she had never seen anyone so coldly and unnecessarily murdered—yet that was now about to change. Such shock blossomed into something alien: an emotional response. Perhaps not compassion entirely, but a growing sense of urgency to stop what was about to commence.

“Stop, don’t do it, Steve; there’s no need,” she pleaded with him as a single errant tear fell from her eyes. She closed her hands around his wrist, but he shook her away abruptly and proceeded toward the man whom in his drunken haze Homicide had thought was hitting on his girl.

“Ya son of a bitch, I’ll teach’a to stare at my girl like that, ya fuckin’ pervert!” he shouted in a drunken slur.

The man had just enough time to shoot a quick glimpse toward Homicide, who was now charging toward him. The man’s eyes widened, startled by what he had seen, and he quickly through his hands out in a warding off gesture and opened his mouth as if to say: Please, don’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Homicide’s arm swung upward like a pendulum, and the rusted metal of the switchblade drove deep into the man’s gut, tearing away at the flesh and muscle and whatever internal organs got in its way. There was a sense of disbelief and fear in the man’s widening eyes when he realized he had been stabbed. Carrie could see his hands tightening into fists as his arms went limp and fell to his flank, and his mouth dropped open as a runner of blood dripped from the corner of his lips. The man yelped and gagged as Homicide jammed his knee into his gut, forcing the switchblade ever deeper into his innards and Carrie could see in her mind’s eye the tip of the knife’s edge protruding through the man’s back, right along where the spine was.

“Jesus Christ, Steve, what’ve you done?” Carrie cried out in horror.

Blood splashed along the darkened pavement as Homicide tore the blade from the man’s belly. A sheath of blood now covered the corroded blade, dripping off the tip and the knife’s edge and washed along Homicide’s forearm as well, but he only grinned, in a state of deep euphoria. “That’ll teach the motherfucker to hit on my girl.”

The man clutched his arms tightly around his abdomen as his face whitened, growing gaunt. Blood continued to spill through his fingers as what looked to be a piece of intestine protruded through the gaping wound. He fell to his knees and cried out hoarsely, squeezing his eyes shut. The man sounded and appeared as though he was about to vomit, but instead doubled over with a few harsh retching sounds as his face hit the pavement. He curled into a fetal position, his hands still clasped to his belly as his knees pressed tightly into his chest. A pool of blood beneath his body expanded along the pavement like ocean waves washing along the beach and his body quivered, twitching in spasms as he groaned and continued to retch dryly, coughing up the blood and bile that was building within his throat.

By now, a crowd from within the bar was drawing around the scene, some of them closing in while others keeping a safe distance and giving both Homicide and Carrie a wide berth. There were startled and astonished gasps and whispers of discussion as growing crowd looked ahead both in wonderment and horror at the events that had transpired. Among the crowd there were a few harsh gagging noises as a couple of people vomited to the side, and there were other murmurs like: “Oh my God,” and “Holy shit, what the fucking hell happened?” But none could take their eyes off the man who laid bleeding and dying in that darkened parking lot, nor the man who had killed him.

A thick froth formed along the lips of Homicide as his eyes continued to blaze with anger and fear, but not a panicked or cowering fear. It was the over-the-edge type of fear felt by a feral animal that was cornered on all ends, but still dangerous and ready to lash out at those who surrounded him. His hand, now gloved in drying blood, tightened around the hilt of his switchblade as he opened his mouth and let loose a savage growl as each of the eyes from the growing crowd beat him down, intensifying his fury.

“Drop your weapon and get on the ground now!” someone demanded, and Carrie’s eyes darted in the direction of the command. She saw a man in his late thirties to early forties with a mustache and a balding pate. He appeared overweight, yet still moved with graceful ease and good coordination as he drew his gun and aimed it at Homicide, his finger poised on the trigger. He wore no uniform—only navy-blue jeans and a beige sports coat, yet revealed himself to be an off-duty officer as he drew his badge and held it in the air with his other hand. “This is the police—you’re under arrest. Now drop your weapon and get on the ground now!”

“Bring it on, ya son of a bitch!” Homicide howled drunkenly.

“I mean it, asshole! Drop the knife or I’ll open fire!”

Instead of dropping the knife, Homicide lurched forward and charged toward the off-duty cop. He shot the tip of the switchblade forward as though it were a short lance and shouted defiantly with a savage roar as his legs carried him forward, staggering and nearly tripping over his ankles, yet still moving with what appeared to be an awkward gracefulness.

The officer opened fire and a gunshot rang out. The flash from the barrel lit up the night sky momentarily, like lightning flicking with the simultaneous roar of thunder over the horizon. The bullet smacked against Homicide’s forehead and drove its way into his skull with a spurt of blood spraying like a geyser from the entry wound. Even as he fell dead to the ground his eyes remained locked in that intense, animalistic gaze.

Carrie screamed, and for the first time in what seemed like an eternity, cried.

 

“What are you doing here?” Carrie asked now, baffled and alarmed by the sight of an older Steven Edwards. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

Instead of looking perplexed, with a gaze in his eye that would have said: What are you, crazy? Steven merely scoffed and rolled his eyes, making Carrie feel smaller, like an annoying little brat worthy only of his contempt, as he often did before when she had gone out with him. “Looks like you’re getting confused again,” he said in a mocking tone as he ruffled his scraggly beard.

“No, you were killed in that parking lot seven years ago by a cop, after you killed that guy in a drunken rage,” Carrie told him, blinking in disbelief. Seeing her old boyfriend back from the dead was a surreal experience, but like finding her son back from the dead earlier today (if it had happened in the same day, which Carrie could no longer tell, because her sense of time now felt fragmented), it seemed all to real, as though perhaps she had imagined him being killed in the first place and treated the fantasy as an authentic memory.

Steve shook his head contemptuously. “That never happened.”

And just like that, the happy life Carrie had worked so hard to build for herself seemed like a lie once more and the marriage she had had with Marcus Newton was merely an unending work of fiction within the fabric of her subconscious, an escape from life’s harsh atmosphere. It had been a long time since she had really questioned that other existence, yet now more than ever it felt phony, not quite dreamlike, but still artificial in its own right. Disillusioned, Carrie looked at her hand as she walked down the hospital corridor with Steve Edwards but saw no wedding ring. She wasn’t Carrie Newton after all, because she had never been married to Marcus Newton, but wasn’t Carrie Edwards either, because she never married that man either. Instead, she once more went by her maiden name (real name) of Carrie Mathews.

No, my life can’t be a lie, it just can’t be! she told herself frantically.

As traumatizing as the events of August 1997 had been in that dark parking lot by the bar, they had sparked the catalyst for Carrie’s redemption. It was tragic in its own way, because two men had been killed, and one of them might have been a good man, but had those events never happened, Carrie’s life would have never changed. Watching Steven “Homicide” Edwards killing a man in cold blood, and then getting killed himself had awakened emotions that had lain dormant for as long as Carrie cared to remember. The events of that long-ago night forced her to evaluate her life up to that point and had instilled within her the need for a change.

It was not always an uphill struggle, for there were obstacles—hurdles to overcome and old habits that needed to be broken. She had her own psychological dependency to marijuana that she needed to overcome if she were to ever move forward to a new existence. There was a short bout of homelessness after Steve’s death, until she was finally able to get a job and a place of her own. Yet in the end, through adversity, she stood triumphant, with the help of Marcus Newton, who would later be her husband, and with whom she would share a happy, loving family in a peaceful suburban neighborhood, away from her dreadful, hopeless past.

It was all a lie and you know it, a cynical voice spoke up.

Indeed she knew it now, as though being in this hospital corridor walking beside Steven Edwards—who she had thought was deceased—acted as the only confirmation she needed. Marcus Newton was nothing more than a fictional character, and that life she had led was mere fantasy being confused with reality. It was a fairy-tale world and nothing more, constructed as an escape from her real life—a life of pain and misery, where her significant other was not a knight in shining armor who treated her well, but a mindless thug who treated her like a slut, and who abused and exploited her every chance he got.

But if this is real, and that other life was a mere fabrication, how come I have no memory of what “really” happened over the past seven years? Carrie asked herself, but could think of no answer. How could it merely be an escape if I didn’t know it to be, unless I really AM crazy?

But you’ve always known it to be fake, deep down in your heart, that same cynical voice spoke up. You just didn’t want to believe it.

“Where are we going?” Carrie asked softly.

“You already know where we’re going,” Homicide retorted with that same contemptuous sigh, speaking down to her as though she were retarded and inferior. “We’re gonna visit Jason.”

Jason. The name reawakened the memories and she once more saw in her mind’s eye the events that had shattered her perfect fictional reality: The death of Jason. Once more, Carrie could see her son being plowed down by a speeding, out-of-control SUV.

But that never happened!

But Jason was really her son, nevertheless, so at least part of the fantasy world had been real. She merely got reality and fantasy mixed up. But Jason was real, and Steve “Homicide” Edwards no doubt abused him like he abused Carrie.

“Oh God, what did you do to him?”

Steven stopped abruptly with an uproar of derisive laughter that echoed along the corridor, drawing attention for a few nurses that had been passing by. “What did I do to him?” he replied, scoffing, but his roaring fit of obnoxious laughter seemed to taper off. “I didn’t do a goddamn thing to him, you stupid bitch! It’s your fault he got hurt in the first place!”

 

“See what you did to him?” Steven crooned as they entered the hospital room where Jason had been placed. “It’s your fault he’s like this,” he said again, as he drew Carrie’s attention to the hospital bed where Jason lay completely motionless, except for a few faint movements of his eyes and lips. He appeared gaunt on that hospital bed, his hair now thin and tangled, hanging like string from his scalp as his face remained thin and pallid, and you could see the imprint of his cheekbone as his cheeks sank inward. He smiled faintly once his eyes caught sight of his mother, and despite what had happened, there was still love for his mother, yet he appeared to shrink away at the sight of the father, not moving, but still expressing some sense of aversion in his eyes.

“Oh God, Jason,” Carrie sobbed, putting her hand over her aching heart as tears spilled freely from her eyes. “What happened?”

“He was run over by a car and it’s your fault!” Steve barked angrily.

“What?” Carrie exclaimed in disbelief. “But I didn’t—”

Homicide shook his head. “No, you didn’t run him over, but had you been watching him, he never woulda run out into the street like that, you dumb cunt!”

Marcus had insisted that what had happened to Jason hadn’t been Carrie’s fault, yet Steve had been all too willing to cast the blame and derided a sadistic joy of reminding her of what she knew all along to be the truth: It was her fault that Jason had been run over. She was as responsible as she would have been had she been driving the SUV that had run the boy over in the first place.

“I’m so sorry,” Carrie said, holding the boy’s cold hand in her own, squeezing her eyes shut, unable to bear the sight of her crippled boy lying broken in a hospital bed. The mere sight of his crippled body was enough to condemn her, for although there was no blame or accusation in the boy’s eyes—only love and vulnerability on his face—looking at him now left her feeling damned anyway. “It really is my fault—I should’ve been watching you more closely. Oh God, I’m so sorry,” she said, and as the sobbing and crying overtook her, she could say no more.

“Poor boy was paralyzed from the neck down,” Steve went on with mocking connotations of compassion, yet appeared not to care much for the boy’s wellbeing or feel the least bit of love or sympathy. The voice was a means of mocking her, of enhancing and augmenting the already powerful sense of guilt that was eating away at her for what had happened. “While most kids will be able to go outside, run around and play games, Jason will never be able to do that, because he can’t move anything other than his head, and it’s your fault for not watching him, you worthless bitch! What the hell kinda mother are you, anyway?” He curled his rigid hand into a fist and grunted, and this time Carrie could pick up a sense of genuine anger in his voice. “Plus we don’t got health coverage, so this shit’s gonna cost me big, damn it!” He threw his fist into the wall like a sledge hammer, enraged.

“Oh God, this can’t be happening,” Carrie murmured through her tears.

And as if on cue, reality began to dissolve before her very eyes.

 

4

At first there was only an abysmal sea of foggy darkness before her, unending space with neither light nor matter, just cold emptiness, like being trapped in a void. The darkness seemed like a thick blanket, yet began to thin as a few specks of light drifted through, like stars lightning up and glistening in a night sky and then the darkness was gone as Carrie rose to consciousness.

Her eyes fluttered open and she found herself in the same hospital room as Jason had been, yet Jason was gone, and so was Steve “Homicide” Edwards. This time she was the one lying in the hospital bed, yet she could move her fingers and twitch her arms, so she couldn’t have been paralyzed from the neck down. Thank God for small favors, she thought bitterly with a sense of confusion. Her head had been bandaged and ached as though the bones in her skull were shattering when she tried to lift her head. She groaned, squeezing her watering eyes closed, and then lay back on her bed as black dots pinpricked her eyes.

“Hey, take it easy,” a nurse with short dark hair said as she approached the side of her bed. “You were hit pretty hard in the head and you’re lucky to be alive.”

“Where am I?” she asked hazily. “What happened?”

“You’re in a hospital,” the nurse explained, holding some papers. “You were run over by a speeding SUV trying to push your son out of the way, and suffered a severe head injury. We can’t be certain of the extent of the brain damage until the swelling goes down, but we are hopeful that you will pull through.” She paused for a minute, ruffling through the papers. “Do you know your name?”

Carrie paused for a considerable length of time, as what felt like a jackhammer continued to thrash against her brain. She opened her mouth, her lips quivering, and replied: “It’s either Carrie Newton, Carrie Mathews, or Carrie Edwards,” she sighed. “I’m not sure anymore, but I know it’s one of those.”

The nurse nodded. “It’s Carrie Mathews.”

Carrie lifted her hand to read the label on the wrist band and sure enough CARRIE MATHEWS was imprinted on it. Her life with Marcus had been a lie after all, yet she felt she had no way of knowing what really happened in regards to anything anymore, as everything that happened recently was later proven to be an illusion. She was given answers, yet those answers were cruelly taken away when they were later debunked.

“What happened to Steve? Where’s Jason?”

“I’m assuming you’re talking about Steven Edwards?” the nurse asked.

Carrie nodded.

“According to records, you left him shortly after Jason was born and raised Jason on your own working two jobs,” the nurse explained.

That’s not how I remember it, Carrie thought with little conviction.

The dreamlike atmosphere that had been lacking before was now present, as reality grew distorted and surreal. Her field of vision blurred and grayed, then regained focus once more with her waxing and waning sense of vertigo. The nurse’s voice seemed to drone from a distance as Carrie’s mind wandered through each possibility. This time around the atmosphere felt distorted, almost surreal, but such symptoms could be attributed to her concussion and whatever brain damage she might have sustained from whatever injury had landed her in this hospital to begin with.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news about your son,” the nurse said. Her face darkened with sorrow and sympathy, but still retaining an err of professionalism. “Your son, Jason, was killed.”

“What do you mean he’s dead?”

“When you pushed him out of the way of the SUV, you pushed him in the path of another speeding car, and while you were trying to save him, he was killed anyway, crushed beneath the tires of a minivan. He died shortly after, while you sustained moderate head trauma after being run over by the SUV yourself.”

“That’s impossible,” Carrie argued, but her voice remained frail. “There weren’t any other cars on the road, so what you’re saying doesn’t make sense.”

The nurse shook her head. “It all happened so fast, so you might not have seen the minivan coming along or remember it, but it was there. I’m sorry.”

Carrie’s heart sank and at that moment, she hated God, or fate, or whoever had been playing such a cruel joke on her—to kill her son, then give him back to her only to kill him all over again. It seemed perfectly plausible to her that life would allow her some joy only to take it away all over again and leave her even more distraught than she had been before, yet her sadness and emotional turmoil remained, stabbing fiercely at her crumpling heart.

Oh God, what’s happening to me? Carrie asked herself, bewildered. It’s just not possible. First Jason’s dead, then he’s alive and well, then he’s alive but crippled, and now he’s dead again? How can this even be possible?

A spark of understanding dawned within her. “I think I know what’s happening?”

The nurse looked at her, puzzled. “Excuse me?”

“There are certain physicists who theorize the existence of infinite alternate realities,” Carrie explained. Her voice was barely a frail murmur, yet somehow the nurse seemed to understand what she was saying. “That every time we make a choice, there is an alternate reality in which we acted differently; a parallel universe where we exist, but the version of ourselves in that universe is either slightly or greatly different, like we have an evil twin.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at,” the nurse said.

“To me, this is an alternate reality,” she went on. “When Jason died, I tortured myself with guilt, wondering what might’ve happened if I’d acted differently. Now I’m finding out by somehow traveling through all these different realities, experiencing life through the eyes of the Carrie Newton/Mathews of a parallel universe and seeing firsthand the different directions my life could’ve taken and the aftermath of all the different ways it could’ve turned out.”

“No offense, Ms. Mathews, but it sounds to me like you’re babbling nonsense,” the nurse said, shaking her head sympathetically. “I think you need some rest.”

“But do you think what I just said is possible?”

“I don’t know,” retorted the nurse as she grabbed a syringe from a cabinet. “I’m not a physicist—I specialize in medicine.”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense anymore,” Carrie sighed, wincing as her temples started to throb again.

“I’m going to give you this sedative,” the nurse said, holding the syringe and a bottle of the sedative. “It’ll put you to sleep for a little while. If you want to talk about this later, or discuss what really happened, I’ll be glad to, but first I have other patients to attend to.”

“I’m fine, I don’t need—” Carrie began, but before she could say anymore, she felt the needle pinch her arm. Once more, reality became distorted as the sedative doped her up. The room became a graying blur of elongated shadows and echoing noises coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time, until Carrie finally slipped away once again.

 

5

Once more, Carrie was engulfed in a sea of total darkness, though this time it wasn’t as disorienting as when she had awakened in the hospital room. Her eyes fluttered open and she saw a gray blur taking focus before her as she realized she was lying on something hard, and there was a dull ache over the small of her back.

Where am I now? she thought groaning.

Before her was a crowd of women—some older, while others younger, and each of different shapes and sizes. There were a few white women, black women, Orientals, Hispanic, and from other races as well. They were all women, though, and each was dressed in the same orange coveralls that she herself was now dressed in. It’s a prison uniform, she told herself listlessly. In this realm, I am a convict. The setting sun shone brightly through the prison bars over by the window as she looked ahead at the red sky. Dusk was approaching and the tint of the sky would soon be indigo. Night would befall this prison soon—wherever this prison happened to be located. Within the prison cell, the stench of tobacco and marijuana lingered in the air, and one of the inmates snorted a bag of cocaine while a couple others passed a syringe to one another. With all the risks of disease these days, it’s amazing some people are still dumb enough to share a needle, Carrie thought with a form of bland astonishment.

“Looks like the evil bitch woke up,” one of the women snickered beside her. Carrie looked and saw that she was sitting next to her. Her flesh was pale, but not sickly or frail. Her head had been shaved, but the hair was starting to grow back in a paper-thin sheath of porous black over her scalp, and over her cheek was a tattoo of a small jade dragon. Her eyes remained cool and jaded, without an ounce of intimidation or insecurity, but instead remained calm, apparently meant to intimidate those who got in her way.

“I’m not an evil bitch,” Carrie argued without conviction, for there was no telling what she might have done in this plane or why she might have been here to begin with.

More and more, Carrie felt as though she were one of the characters on that show Sliders, which had aired on the Fox Network for a few years back in the mid to late nineties, traveling through each new reality and seeing how different it was from the last, unable to get back to her own realm. Except in this case, Carrie never knew when she would transfer from one plane of reality to the next, but instead was abruptly thrust against her will when she least expected it. And this time each new reality she transitioned to was directly related to her own life and the many different ways it could have turned out. Each one happened to end up after Jason had been run over somehow, except this one perhaps, though Carrie didn’t know enough about it yet.

“I’d say you’re pretty damn evil,” the Dragon Lady went on. “I guess ‘evil’ is a relative term, but I’d say anyone who’d kill their own son is pretty damn evil in my book. I mean, I’ve done some pretty bad things, but even I’d never kill my son.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Carrie snapped venomously at the Dragon Lady, aghast at the vapid things that had spewed forth from her mouth. Anger seized her now as rabid forth flew from her lips. “You fucking bitch, I didn’t kill Jason, you hear me, I didn’t fucking do it! I’d never hurt my body, never!”

By now, the rest of the inmates in that cell began to draw closer to the commotion, yet Carrie remained only vaguely aware of this. Instead, she focused all her attention—all her righteous fury—on the Dragon Lady, who only sat there on the cot next to her with a smug, contemptuous, and damning grin.

“You pushed your kid into the road and he got run over,” the Dragon Lady informed her. “Pretty bold move on your part, doing it in broad daylight. I mean, did you really think you’d get away with it?”

And then, Carrie could see in her mind’s eye the events transpiring as the Dragon Lady had described them. As the SUV comes zooming down the road, Carrie runs toward Jason, who is standing by the curb. With great force, Carrie throws out her hands, her palms slapping against Jason’s back, and Jason is sent careening into the road just as the blaring horn of the SUV goes off. Jason screams, startled by the sudden momentum carrying him into the road. The breaks squeal as the SUV struggles in vain to come to a halt, but it is too late, and Jason is run down, his body thrown forward from the momentum of the impact as his skull and ribs shatter from the collision and his face becomes awash in thick blood and brains. And as Jason’s body lies on the street, sprawled in a pool of blood, his mother stands by the side of the curb, grinning triumphantly.

The vision was jarring, like a repressed memory resurfacing, coming to light of exposure, yet Carrie knew it not to be a memory, for she knew that despite what might have happened in the past, she was now a good person and knew further that she could never bring herself to harm her child, could never even dream of it.

It couldn’t be real.

Yet in this reality, that must be exactly what happened, she told herself. For in this reality, she had never gotten away from Steven “Homicide” Edwards to meet up with Marcus Newton, nor had she sunken deeper into a state of blissful apathy. Instead she basked in Homicide’s corruption until she finally metamorphosed into something demonic, sociopathic, and downright evil. Carrie had never been an angel, she knew, yet in this reality, she had fallen so far that indeed she was capable of hurting her son, and of killing him, and in fact seemed to deride a great deal of gratification from doing so.

But it’s not me, she reminded herself desperately. It was someone else who would be me in this reality, the way I COULD have turned out, but it still isn’t me, because I know what I became, and that’s a good, loving mother.

Yet she looked once more throughout the dank prison cell, seeing all the accusatory stares from the other women gazing her down. The Dragon Lady’s cold gaze of condemnation had been the worse, and she was the first and only one out of the whole crowd to say what the rest of them had no doubt been thinking: “You’re one evil bitch for what you did, and you don’t deserve to live!”

Carrie threw herself to her feet and lunged to the side. She roared and growled angrily as her hands clasped tightly around the neck of the Dragon Lady, her fingers digging along the veins of her neck as her thumbs pressed down hard against the Dragon Lady’s atom’s apple. Hot tears seared through Carrie’s eyes as she screamed shrilly, sweat breaking along her brow. The Dragon Lady’s mouth dropped open, struggling to cry for help, yet she could utter nothing but a few hoarse croaks and gasps for air. As her head slammed against the cement wall of the prison cell, the Dragon Lady throw out her hands blindly for purchase, yet Carrie’s hands were like a vice around her throat, locked in place and impenetrable. The Dragon Lady’s eyes glazed in hot fear as the tint of her face turned a bluish purple, yet still she struggled in vein to release herself. Her forked tongue poked out from her blackened lips, yet she remained unable to suck in any air.

“Hey, what the hell’s goin’ on?” one of the guards exclaimed as she slid the cell door open, rushing toward Carrie. Yet by the time the guards made it onto the scene, Carrie had already gone under.

 

6

Carrie watched once more in horror as Jason bolted into the street after his tennis ball. She knew that this was not the reality where her spirit (or whatever it had been that traveled through each new reality) had originated, yet it seemed close enough. The neighborhood had been a peaceful suburban one; the same one she had lived in with Marcus Newton for the past six years of her life, where she had raised Jason. This was her house, and everything seemed to be as she had left it, yet it seemed she was now replaying the scene of Jason’s death over again, not in her mind, but physically repeating the events, as though she had gone back in time, or perhaps as though she were on a TV show and this was a rerun.

“Jason, stop!” she called out desperately, but the boy seemed not to hear.

The tennis ball continued to roll down the two-lane residential street, too far from the boy’s grasp, yet Jason continued after it. From up ahead, the same SUV driven by Ivan Cleveland was zooming by, seemingly coming a mile closer with each passing second, yet moving in slow motion, as though to draw out the devastation before her eyes, forcing the pain and horror to linger forever glued to her mind.

I can’t let it happen again, Carrie thought frantically.

This is your chance to set things right, a voice spoke up in her head, comforting yet hurrying at the same time, shaking her to her feet. Take it and save your son! Save Jason before you lose him all over again!

Carrie’s legs seemed to carry her of their own volition as she ran toward the street after Jason. She threw out her hands and called out to the boy once more: “Jason, please stop! A car is coming!” Yet Jason continued into the road after his tennis ball, seemingly obvious to his mother’s pleas as well as the tremors of the oncoming SUV, whose headlights seemed to bore down upon the boy in a blazing predatory gaze.

HOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNNNK!

The SUV blared its horn loudly as the tires squealed along the pavement, yet it was unable to come to a halt, and instead Carrie could almost see the teeth of the grill on the front grinning, as if to say: At last; fresh meat! Like a feral beast, the SUV hurried onward, breaks squealing as the driver struggled in vain to bring it to a halt before colliding with the boy in front of it; Jason was now all too aware of the car coming before him and stood paralyzed in fear as the tennis ball rolled onward and eventually rebounded off the curb.

“For the love of God, Jason, get outta the way!” cried Carrie.

Without hesitation or fear, Carrie threw herself into the road and felt the heat of the SUV’s headlights pinning her down as she herself was now in its warpath. Jason had just enough time to veer his head slightly toward his mother’s direction before Carrie threw her hands out, shoving Jason away and sending him staggering uncontrollably toward the other side of the road. Jason cried out in shock from the sudden momentum, before his ankles tripped over the curb, and he toppled over. He had scraped his forearm against the rugged concrete surface of the sidewalk, and began to cry in pain from the injury, but was otherwise out of harms way.

As the SUV slammed against Carrie’s body, there was a sudden burst of pain exploding along her flank and shooting throughout the rest of her body. The impact seemed sudden, yet was to be expected. It robbed the breath from her and drowned out her agonized cries as the metal of the SUV’s front shattered her hip and the side of her rib cage, pushing the jagged ends of broken ribs into her left lung. Carrie was then taken off her feet and thrown helplessly across the SUV’s hood. She slid across the metal hood like a puck in a hockey arena before her forehead rebounded off the windshield with a thunderous crunching sound, resulting from both the cracking laminated glass windshield pane as well as her shattering skull. There was a thick crimson translucence before her field of vision as blood gushed heavily from her shattered forehead into her eyes and masking her face. Her body continued to tumble in an almost spiral motion—like a log falling upwards—over the roof of the SUV before being thrust off the back edge of the vehicle and plunging with great force over the hardened concrete surface below, just as the driver of the SUV finally brought it to a squealing halt.

The driver of the SUV stepped out and sure enough, it had been Ivan Cleveland, from the family whom Carrie had always wanted to see fall in disgrace, but certainly never like this. “Holy shit, what’ve I done?” Ivan cried out as his face whitened like that of a ghost. He looked down upon Carrie’s dying, bleeding corpse and his eyes widened even further as his mouth hung open, making a few wretched gagging noises. “Oh God,” he murmured, squeezing his eyes shut, before he fell to his hands and knees and vomited profusely over the blacktop. “Jesus Christ, I—” He rose slowly to his feet once more, took a final glance toward Carrie, then climbed back into his SUV and sped off even faster than before down the road.

From a distance, Carrie could hear her son crying: “Mommy!”

From somewhere else, she could hear a few doors swinging open, and then footfalls over the pavement, coming closer. “Oh God, what happened?” someone cried, and Carrie recognized the voice as that of Kirsten’s.

Carrie lay motionless by the side of the street as blood continued to gush heavily from her face and fell into her eyes, reddening her field of vision. She looked up blankly at the setting sun, whose sharp rays burned her eyes, yet seemed to break up and disintegrate as her vision began to blur and darken. Her entire body was numb now, her head lolled almost lifelessly over her neck, and the only thing she could feel was the blood rising in her throat and flowing in thin red strands from her flaring nostrils and the corners of her mouth. She was dying, but there was no fear or discomfort; only a blissful sense of peace in the knowledge that she had set things right. Whether or not this was her reality, it was as close as it needed to be, and somehow she knew that what had happened now was what was meant to happen all along.

“Oh my God, someone call a medic, she’s been hit!” cried Kirsten, seemingly from a distance, yet closing in.

Carrie saw now a circle of faces hovering above, each one haggard, dismayed, and distraught. Among the faces had been Jason. Tears were now streaming from his anguished, pallid face. He couldn’t stop crying; no longer because of his skinned elbow, but because of the overwhelming grief he felt now after having seen his mother run over and peering down upon her now, watching her die.

“Don’t cry, Jason,” Carrie murmured softly as she raised her arm weakly and held her son’s hand in a loose grip, feeling the warmth of his love. “I love you so much, Jason, remember that. And tell Daddy….tell him I love him too, and am thankful for everything he’s done for me.” She paused, coughing with a light wheeze. “Be good, Jason,” she whispered, smiling as tears spilled down her face.

Through the hazy, graying circle of faces was also Kirsten standing over her, her eyes glistening with tears as she stood, speechless and overtaken with grief. Carrie smiled warmly at her: Good old Kirsten, she thought, always there for me…always such a wonderful friend. Perhaps in a few of the many alternate realities, there existed a Kirsten who was mean-spirited, sadistic, and evil, but Carrie banished such thoughts from her mind, for her Kirsten—the true Kirsten in the actual reality—had been nothing short of compassionate, kind, and wonderful. Carrie reached her weak, trembling arm toward Kirsten now and took hold of it loosely, feeling the warmth of their friendship radiate through her battered, dying body. “Thank you for being my friend through the years, Kirsten, and for always being there for me,” Carrie murmured weakly with a wan smile. Kirsten held Carrie’s hand tightly as tears continued to spill down her cheeks, unable to say anything through the muffling sniffs and sobs.

From a distance echoed the warbling sirens of an ambulance.

Blackness danced across Carrie’s field of vision, expanding across the graying light and she could feel tears of warmth and joy filling her eyes for a second or two before she finally slipped away for the last time.

 

The End

January 29, 2004
March 05, 2004