Saved

The day had started out like every other Saturday morning, I was up early eating a bowl of my favourite breakfast cereal and by 9 o’clock I was swimming lengths in the pool out back. It was the middle of summer and I was clad in my new bikini. After re-applying some sun lotion, I was all too happy to sit out on the deck chair and read a book.

Unlike most girls my age, I got on well with my parents so when mum got back from her routine early-morning food shopping and told me that she and my dad had planned a day out, I was happy to run upstairs, shower and get ready to go.

Dad returned home from his morning errands at the usual time, he was a local business owner and he liked to get down to the office and sort out the accounts early so that it wouldn’t impact our ‘family time’.

I came downstairs freshly washed, dried and barefaced – puberty had been kind to me; not a single blemish or pimple in sixteen years - by this time mum had finished bustling about in the kitchen, putting away all the groceries and dad had changed out of his suit and into something more casual.
Mum and I were stood in the hallway, just waiting for my father to make a digital copy of the accounts on his computer. I turned to the mirror to give my hair its last ruffle so all the soft curls were out of my face.

“Oh, Sophia” my mum said gently, her shorter reflection stood behind me in the mirror, “You’re ever so pretty, but when are you going to bring home a boy?” my mother was brought up in traditional Italy, her soft accent and olive complexion was a reminder of this, but she longed for me to have a boyfriend and be married young – as she was.

I shrugged in response to her question, as I usually did, I understood she was brought up in a whole other world than I was; but we now lived in modern America where young marriage was not the norm but the exception.

“Aren’t you at least interested in boys?” she asked me

“Other things are more important” I told her. I was never able to tell a direct lie, not just to my parents, to anyone. I’d tried plenty of times but at first my face would feel warm, then my palms would start to sweat and my racing heart would cause my tongue to stick in my mouth – instead it was easier to avoid answering any direct questions with direct answers.

To my reply she shook her head silently, planted a kiss on my cheek and slowly turned to make her way into my dad’s office, leaving me to stare at the girl standing in the refection; she had fair skin and wide almond-shaped eyes that were almost too large for her face.

The light chestnut-brown of my hair must have come from my dad’s side of the family because mum’s side were all dark haired and olive-skinned. In fact all that I seemed to have inherited from my mum was her smile and, lucky for me, my mum had a lovely smile.



With a picnic packed in the trunk of the car and my parents talking animatedly in the front seats, I was left to listen to my iPod. With the earphones crammed into my ears, I absorbed the surroundings as they rolled past us at a steady pace.

I liked listening to music on journeys, it gave you time to think without distractions. I looked back up at my parents who were laughing at something together, still in love after all of these years – it was more than could be said about most couples.

We were now away from the bumpy country lanes that were surrounded by fields and cattle and we were now moving on from town to town, the further we drove the bigger the town roads got, you could see the transition from town to city as the companies we passed got more and more commercial.

Mum was humming along to a piece of traditional music when we reached the crossroads; I looked up mainly because dad had slowed dramatically. I could see the problem instantly, all four lanes were backed up with traffic – the traffic lights weren’t working.

For the most part, the situation was under control, the lanes with the largest lines – the two lanes to each side of us- had priority at the moment, both of them moving steadily forward, then when the numbers started to dwindle; someone in the lane opposite us started to edge forward causing the other two lanes to slow to a halt.

There was a guy in a rusty old pick-up truck in one of the lanes beside us, he kept revving his engine and starting forwards, I stared over at him and saw him mouthing something that looked to be a long string of curses. It was finally our turn to go through the crossroads and the bare chested man in the red pick-up was growing ever more frantic, beeping his horn as though it would do any good.

We had just reached the middle of the junction when I saw the fresh hope in the man’s eye, which was when I turned and noticed the gap between us and the car in front. Surely he wouldn’t?
It was the deafening unison of car horns that made me look back to the man but it was too late, he was already moving towards us at a dangerous pace.

“NOOOOO!” a girl screamed, voice breaking at the end, it took a second before I realised it was me, I was screaming hysterically, willing him to stop.

He realised his mistake after everyone else did as he hurtled towards us, spinning his wheel at the last minute trying to avoid a collision. He was going too fast to avoid anything, his car swerved and the whole side of his truck came swinging into the side of ours.

Please don’t kill us, please don’t kill us I begged internally.

I was deafened by the crash of metal-on-metal, it was like nothing I’d ever heard before and my ears were full of ringing, unable to hear anything else.

I was trying to shout to my parents, our car had toppled and I was panicking, but I couldn’t hear a single sound coming out of my mouth, only that loud ring in my ears.

Our car was on its side, I had to get out but unbuckling my belt meant I came crashing down from my seat to the door that was flat against the floor.

I started noticing the pain then, blossoming in my both sides, the blood was pounding in my head, a constant throb. Blood was tricking down from my hairline and into my eyes, I wiped it away with the back of my bleeding hand. It took me a while to realise that the window had been smashed, then I started to notice all the puncture marks over my skin, shards of glass impaled in my skin.
The ringing was lessening, other noises started to seep through.

“MUM, DAD!! MUM! MUM, TELL ME YOU’RE OKAY…” words were spilling out of my mouth, I had no control, my eyes burned with unshed tears and a large, stinging lump in my throat stopped me from sobbing.

My thoughts were getting illogical by now.

Juniper and Roxanne, they can help us. When we all get back from hospital they can help me catch up with school work and their parents will only be too happy to help out my parents, they’re all very good friends.

“MUM, ANSWER ME!!” I kept shouting

Dad can easily run his business from home, he can keep the managers updated by email

It was the overwhelming smell of petrol that paused my thoughts, we had to get out now. My breathing accelerated into a panic attack, my chest had tightened as I struggled to breathe. In great agony, I reached over and looked at my parents, ready to tell them they had to run but what I actually saw left me screaming.

My mum’s head lolled to one side, her neck was at an unnatural angle, blood was smeared on the glass he head was resting on but the rest of the blood had been dripping onto her from my dad. There was no doubt that his legs were broken. Blood dripped out of his ears and he was still twitching in his seat, his breathing came in gurgles, more and more so until it stopped altogether and blood poured its way out of his mouth too. He convulsed twice more before he stilled. Stilled forever.
They both lay there like broken dolls, eyes open, staring forward.

A gurgle of hysteria hiccupped out of me; something between a sob and a giggle. I lay there like a crumpled ragdoll, having hysterics, forgetting all about why I should be trying to escape, forgetting the smell of petrol. Instead I was overcome by the smell of copper pennies and that deeper smell of meat.

That’s what my parents were, dead meat, bodies, cadavers, corpses, things, its, but never a he or a she, never mum or dad, never Paul and Marietta.



It was a reoccurring nightmare – the crash – when I could get to sleep, and when I couldn’t, I had flashbacks.

The nightmares were rarely accurate to what happened but they were just as horrifying; my parents driving along the road, turning back to stare with rotting faces before purposefully driving over a cliff or into a wall; me locked inside the car with my parents trying to claw their way in to kill me, the scenarios were infinite and each of them was as disturbing as the next.

The aftermath of the accident was still a blur of memories and sounds, though I knew what happened from what I’d been told.

I recall the sound of loud sirens and the feel of hands saving me from the wreckage of the car, but I think the explosion caught everyone unawares. The deafening impact of the explosion rendered me helpless. Pain everywhere; it was as though something was pressing in on me and it was harder to breathe in that burning air filled with the smell of burning flesh.

Once again, I was ‘lucky’ the explosion just missed me but one of the EMTs helping me across to the stationary ambulance was hit with a burning wave of fire, she obtained burns to her back and head. I remember her screaming, her panic that she was on fire yet she was unable to get her clothes off.
My parents were in the middle of the explosion, I would never be able to bury them, to say a last farewell nor to leave a shrine at their place of death…

In the midst of the panic caused by the explosion, I was forgotten, the first EMT was tending to the second – suffering severe burns- onlookers were screaming and trying to get their family to safety. No one really noticed the pair of hands unstrapping me from the backboard, the very same hands that lifted me as though I weighed nothing.

It was a mixture of emotions that left me feeling ill, grief at the loss of my parents, shock at the suddenness of it all, fear at almost losing my own life and confusion, what was going on?
Inevitably I threw up, and it seemed the stranger had expected it too because he held me at arm’s length for a moment allowing me to empty my breakfast into a hedge near the side of the road.

Nobody stopped him from just walking away from the scene with me, almost as though they couldn’t see us, we were anonymous, invisible to them.