III
Loud sound of a car crash ripped the silence of the room and exploded in Loxy’s head and chest, sudden surge of adrenaline burst him into a ball of fire. He jumped up, on his feet and ran outside. As he ran out of the building he saw what he feared he would. On his left, to the East, a quarter of a mile away, on the busy intersection, the ambulance was still sliding in circular motion, next to the awkwardly positioned dark-blue semi truck. He thought that he saw the broken pieces of glass, continued to drift in the air, defying the law of gravity and sparkling like little pieces of the broken rainbow under the angular rays of the early afternoon.
The ambulance halted, before Loxy got there. He stopped a few feet away not realizing that his instincts driven by intuition kept him at a safe distance.
Screams of fear, pain and wailing of the distant sirens filled the air, stopping people around. “It is too late…” Loxy thought without grasping the end meaning of the sentence. And it was definitely too late for Lisa. Her body, still strapped to the gurney was suspended in the air when the gurney flew through the broken and wide open back door of the ambulance and landed upside down with one end still inside and the other side was ramping on the street. Lisa’s head was dangling down to her right with a gushing cut on the left side of her neck and a piece of metal imbedded there like the dull blade of a guillotine that can do only a half ass job. Pool of blood and Lisa’s pale face told Loxy that it was over. He was standing there and watching as the last drops of blood were dripping from her neck one by one, making small concentric circles in the pool, “still alive” strange thought entered Loxy’s mind.
Loxy saw a fire in the front of ambulance that was aggressively hissing, while consuming medical supplies of the ambulance. Loxy thought about the canister filled with compressed oxygen that was attached to Lisa’s face via mask a few minutes ago and now was lost somewhere in the debris. The stream of gasoline that was leaking from the tank was making a pass toward the pool of Lisa’s blood…
A few minutes earlier all the blood was where it belonged, rushing through Lisa’s arteries enriched by supplemental oxygen and strengthened by the meds that were fighting for her life. And she was in a happy place of her dream. She lay down on her back in a grass and wild flowers; cat by the name of Cat was sitting next to her pouring something nice and unknown. She was looking into the depth of a blue sky. The owl was missing; she flew away a few moments ago. And how hard Lisa tried to imagine the owl in her dream, the owl was nowhere to be found.
And suddenly Lisa saw in the deep sky a small dark object flying or falling down; it was changing color and appearance as it was getting closer. It was her owl! She was growing fast in size covering Lisa’s view, and she made unpleasant, statically scratching sounds.
Then darkness and a painful sting on the left side of Lisa’s neck, she tried to hold her hand to it, but the grass and flowers entangled her immobile. She tried to pull herself out and in the last attempt she regained consciousness for a split moment, just enough to realize the reality of the situation.
And she did. With the speed of light, her mind knew that she ended up in a car crash, that she was strapped to the board and that she was bleeding profusely from the cut on her neck. She felt the sticky warmth of her blood on her chest, shoulder and back, tasted unpleasant saltiness in her mouth and she was trying to cough out its suffocating presence from her lungs. She knew that it was her last moment, The Moment. She was calm and ready. And she helplessly surrendered herself in the hands of her faith.
She had drifted back into unconsciousness fast and it was not a field anymore, it was a huge owl’s eye closer and closer to Lisa’s vision, until she saw a deep emptiness there and then a flicker of fire on the far distance that was attracting and absorbing the last drops of Lisa’s awareness, while Cat was purring somewhere close…
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