Brakelights
BRAKELIGHTS

First published 'Crimson' 1995



The side-mirror on the car door reflected my own face instead of that damn pile-driver of a speedster who hugged my bumper. The rearview on the windscreen was equally dislodged - and it now dawned on me what it was to have no eyes in the back of my head. Although reflections were, at best, one notch beyond the norm of dream and with even reality itself not the most bankable of products, I struggled to adjust both mirrors. Yet the car itself ill-compensated for my endeavours due to the unusual slope of the road's camber, each of the contraflow cones at a perceptibly different angle from the next.

I wished I hadn't broken my sight-line. The night was darker this time, too - and more blurred: glowing slugs of yellow, red and white seeping into each other like a Pollock painting. The windscreen itself was caked with flies, turning scarlet as I spattered into them.

It was so warm I wondered if I were over-heating. I peered at the gauge, but couldn't read it properly: two needles, both flickering madly between hot and cold. The speedometer wasn't moving, despite my quick changing perspective. The petrol indication was on the blink. But I couldn't have run out of petrol. I had only just got a sumpful at the service station. I felt my stomach and smiled. I imagined my arm was the gear-lever and it stirred the engine, donating my blood as a supplement to the oil level. The tatters of flesh acted as a further lubricant to the meshing cogs and fans. Then, it felt as if splinters of bone infiltrated the system. The engine over-choked. Honking my guts out. Lungs on their last legs. Spirit barely level. I only hoped I would last as long as the vehicle.

Corkscrewed my neck to see whether I had shaken off the pursuer. Two bright eyes searing the darkness, the sharp shadows of twin upraised mudguards even blacker than the night, the crenellated grin of the radiator bloodied by my rear lights, the number-plate picked out like the mirror-image of a dead language. I pressed a button, pretending to be James Bond. I full expected jagged steel tyre-spoilers to jab from my underbelly into the pursuer's path. Instead, the side windows descended into the doors with a mocking hum, exposing all the fish-mash brain and tangled bone.

The current night abruptly clarified into an apparently more dependable reality - and, with this new perspective, I was the pursuer, not the pursued: rather a shock to be dead on a tail, my own sucking-sump of a belly eager for another re-fill. A pair of crimson eyes ahead engorged larger by the second as my own reality roared through someone else's fly-splattered dreams.