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Driving While Phoning
“Oh my God,” Clara
said, “are you ok?”
Nathan
limped into the living room and laid his helmet on the coffee table. The side of his
face was streaked red with a long
ugly frictionburn. The sticker that once carried the helmet’s logo was
scraped clean to the underlying plastic, and the shoulder of his cycling
shirt peeled back in curled spandex tatters. He looked like he’d just
crawled out fromunder an overturned bus.
“Honey.”
Clara soaked a washcloth in cold water and brought bandages and Bactine in from the bathroom. “How did this happen?”
“Ow.”
Nathan’s fists clenched and teeth ground as Clara cleaned his face.
“I. I don’t really want to talk about it.” He closed his
eyes and listened to his skin fizz under the antiseptic.
Nathan
was a novice cyclist. For the last three months he had biked every day to and from work,
a hilly twelve mile roundtrip, on some
of the city’s less crowded but still busy streets. The bike was Clara’s suggestion, and he was glad he’d accepted. He had lost
twenty pounds, had more energy, and the doctor said that Nathan’s blood
pressure had finally dropped to healthy, thirty-one year old male levels. It was
precisely what Clara had hoped for: a successful way for Nathan to
cope with their stressful two years in L.A..
Clara
blew gently on her fiancé’s bloody scrape. “Come on honey bear. What happened?”
“Nothing,”
Nathan barked, then drew a deep breath. “Something stupid. You don’t even want to know.”
She
scooted beside him on the couch, rubbed his tense shoulders through the shredded fabric.
“I’m sorry, I won’t push.”
Fuzzy
curls of blood spread through the towel’s soft fabric. He squirmed slightly under her massaging hands’ pressure, but her loving
touch felt
so good on his muscles that under his breath he whispered,
“I was on my cell phone.”
“What?”
He
hid his eyes behind the towel to block her gaze. “I was on my cell phone. Talking, you know, to a client, and…”
Clara
gasped. “You hit something?”
“Worse.
My tire went into one of those old train tracks which threw off my balance and then, boom.” He slapped his palms together
and shaped one hand into an arrow to illustrate his flight. “Right over the
handlebars.”
“No.”
Her eyes squeezed shut. Her fingernails poked into his back. “But, we talked about that. We made a deal.”
“I
know,” he groaned. “I know. I just, the phone was ringing and I saw who it was and...” A muscle in his back started to spasm.
“There’s just not enough time in the day to do everything.” The look of
disappointment in his fiancé’s eyes hurt worse than the scrape and
developing bruises.
“The phone’s a bad habit.”
“But
that was part of the whole bike thing. To slow down. To not multitask on your commute.”
“You’re
right,” he said. “Absolutely.”
He’d
had seven tickets in the last twelve months, been threatened by a delivery driver with a tire iron after honking an obscenely
long time on
the Sepulveda, and had begun feeling tiny painful
palpitations every time he so much as approached a freeway onramp. His annual
insurance now cost a quarter of the price of his midsize sedan. But the concern
wasn’t so much the money as his health. His mind, like his body,
buckled under the stress of the daily commute. The speed of traffic mixed with
the constant congestion and ruthlessness of drivers instilled in him the
fervor of a trapped animal. Driving made his eyes bulge and his toes
curl and made him yell and weave and flip people off, which required
admirable dexterity since his right hand was devoted to his phone and
day-planner.
Wax
paper crinkled as it peeled from the bandage. “I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t be home,” he said. “I hate having to tell you.”
Her
face tightened like a dried walnut. Nathan wasn’t the only one whose multitasking had become a problem. Lately, Clara and Nathan
had read
numerous articles in the L.A. Times and Bay Area papers
about traffic accidents involving cell phones. Straying across lane lines,
missing turn-offs, fender benders and fatalities - nothing seemed to
stop people from driving while phoning. So Clara proposed a deal: if
Nathan promised not to take calls and read his planner and drive, she would
help turn their workout room into an office; that way he could do
business before work rather than on the road. After he rear-ended a car
three months ago while speed-dialing, though, she suggested the bike.
Nathan
leaned forward and cupped his face in his hands. There were so many things she wanted to say to him: you broke your
promise; you could’ve been killed; I hope this heals quickly, the
wedding’s in eight weeks. She said nothing. She simply rubbed his back.
“Live
and learn,” he said with a pained smile. “Can’t let it keep me down. Ouch.” Nathan lifted his leg manually to stretch it
out. “Charley horse’s starting to set in.”
“I
don’t know, since you can’t uphold our deal, I think it’s time you rode the bus.”
“And
have to get up an hour earlier to travel six miles? No way.”
Clara
shrugged and secured the bandage to his cheek. “Well, it’s not like you can ride your bike now anyway.”
Nathan
sighed. From the kitchen counter Clara’s phone twinkled its little Tinker Bell call and buzzed like a dying wasp across the
Formica. Nathan set the ruined helmet atop his red sweaty head and tossed
his cell on the table. “Stupid phones.”
Aaron Gilbreath lives with his ferret and cat amid stacks of Jimmy Smith
CDs in Portland, Oregon, though his heart is in the Sunbelt. He has been
published in AntiMuse, personally insulted by an editor of Spork Magazine,
and is now overjoyed to have his fiction published in Ascent Aspirations
Magazine. He can be found cleaning up books and old coffee cups at
Powell's Books.
Email: Aaron Gilbreath
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