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The Accident
Chapter 3: The Sound
People always implore about it when I bring it up, and I know what kind of person I’m dealing with based on what they ask about it. The brave ones ask what it looked like. The emotional ones ask what it felt like afterwards. For reasons I’ve never come to fully comprehend, all of the ones preoccupied with science asked what it smelled like, as if I had really stopped at the moment it happened to take a good whiff of the air and say “hmm, I’d say this smells like mildew and rotten meat.” Although it did.
The one thing nobody asks, though, is what it sounded like. And I’ve always found it curious that nobody thinks to ask about the noise, because that’s what stands out most vividly of all in my mind. I can still hear it, if I sit still and think about it, but I don’t do that anymore because it never changes and I’ve grown weary of hearing that sound. Most of all, I’m weary of the noise that preceded it, which I can recall just as easily as the noise of the thing itself. The way the wind rushed past me in that fraction of a moment made a swift, swooping noise, like a basketball swishing into a basket and then bursting onto the ground in an eruption of blood, a vile cacophony of thick, dense splatters and hollow cracks as bone shatters against the concrete. But it’s the swoop, that quiet rush of air that drifted across my face as he blurred past me, that haunts me more than anything. I can always remember it. It’s August, just after midnight, the air is warm, I hear a soft, mellow swoosh of wind, and then my ears are corrupted forever.
The one thing nobody asks, though, is what it sounded like. And I’ve always found it curious that nobody thinks to ask about the noise, because that’s what stands out most vividly of all in my mind. I can still hear it, if I sit still and think about it, but I don’t do that anymore because it never changes and I’ve grown weary of hearing that sound. Most of all, I’m weary of the noise that preceded it, which I can recall just as easily as the noise of the thing itself. The way the wind rushed past me in that fraction of a moment made a swift, swooping noise, like a basketball swishing into a basket and then bursting onto the ground in an eruption of blood, a vile cacophony of thick, dense splatters and hollow cracks as bone shatters against the concrete. But it’s the swoop, that quiet rush of air that drifted across my face as he blurred past me, that haunts me more than anything. I can always remember it. It’s August, just after midnight, the air is warm, I hear a soft, mellow swoosh of wind, and then my ears are corrupted forever.
♠ ♠ ♠
This section is very much its own entity, and with it being so awkwardly short, I thought at first I could tack it onto either the preceding or following sections. But I liked the way it flowed and ended so much that I decided to suck it up and publish it as a standalone chapter.