You’re stuck in a traffic jam on a motorway.
You’d been driving back, alone, from your family’s Christmas reunion. It’s a day before New Years Eve. It’s late in the afternoon, so the sun is just setting, and around you cars have their headlights already lit.
As you look to your left and right, you see people in their own metal bubble of warmth and familiar scent.
Your minds eye lifts up and above you, and you see yourself trapped in an unending stream of metal, like a tin of anchovies stuck on a broken down conveyor belt. As far as your minds eye can see there is nothing but boxes of humanity, from every possible walk of life all brought together in this shared experience of inactivity and frustration.
Looking out through the windscreen of your car, all you can see stretching away is red tail lights, and the mismatch of letters and numbers that make up the multitude of registration plates. You idly try and make words out of the number plates you can see, wondering what your scrabble score would be for “LA55 BAT”.
You feel alone, sat with only the softly playing radio for company, but you’re not lonely. The fact that the traffic has ground to such a final halt has given you a little bit of time to relax, away from the stress of battling the inconsiderate, dangerous, incompetent, and sometimes just naive other drivers.
With your eyes closed, and your head resting back against the headrest, you can feel the engine of your car gently throbbing beneath and around you, and are very conscious of your own heartbeat and slow, relaxed breathing.
You become extremely aware of yourself physically – the feel of your trousers against the skin of your hands, the weight of your jacket enclosing your arms and shoulders.
The flash, when it comes, is like a million paparazzi camera bulbs all going off at once. You instinctively squeeze your eyes shut until the blinding light fades from outside your eyelids. As you carefully open your eyes and gaze out of the windscreen, on the horizon you see a mushroom cloud. It’s like the mushroom clouds you’ve seen from the 1940’s black & white films, epic in it’s size, dark oranges and yellows funneling up into a thick, black fist of smoke and dust. You become aware of a deep, throbbing vibration coming up through the floor of the car, and as you sit you are shaken in place, like the last match in an empty match box.
As your vision begins to blur with the vibration of your skull, you see cars up ahead being flung up and away violently, as though they were toy cars being kicked across the playroom of an angry toddler. The last sensation you feel is that of immense heat, as the windscreen in front of you gives way, showering you in broken diamonds of safety glass. Your last thoughts are of how this shouldn’t be happening to you, the protagonist, the hero of your own narrative.
As your broken body is melted into the interior of your now madly hurtling car, your last shred of consciousness disappears like a dream upon waking.
Experimental Fiction 