DUI

Yeah it's been a long while since I've written anything and posted it up, all the school and stuff. As the theme has been lately, this is'nt completely finished and is only half way through. I haven't done my usual obsessive revising in the last couple paragraphs but I still would want some feed back and such if anyone would like to comment on it and tell me what they think I should work on or fix in it. This is quite a bit darker than most of the things that I have written but sometimes you gotta let whats in your mind come out whether it be good or bad or stupid or intelligent....but thats another treatise. On to the story!


The white noise of the road always seemed to calm Ned for some odd reason. The smell of alcohol invaded his soggy nostrils as he brushed away the moister on his cheek, the dotted yellow line blurred from his speed as he drove down a lesser known country road. With a bit of effort and the coordination of a boneless man he clicked on the radio, not so he could listen to the music so much as just creating familiarity. It was one of his rituals to help cool down after getting into a emotional situation that seemed to send his world spinning and this was his way of grabbing hold to reality and trying to focus, to drive in his faithful old station wagon for hours on end to no place in particular. His car unbeknownst to him, lazily weaved from side to side down the road, causing the piles of leftover trash from countless meals at McDonalds to sway from side to side on top of the dashboard. The usual monstrous creaking of the ancient station wagon began to pick up a rhythm as pebbles chipped away at the door whenever the car veered too far over, running through the gravel on the side of the road. Anger and depression danced within his mind and toyed with his rational thinking, it’s strange how things on opposite sides of the emotional spectrum tend to merge together when tensions run high. “Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten so upset so quickly….” he said to himself with a bit of a drunken slur, looking back to the argument.


“Why are you jumping to such ridiculous conclusions! He was an old friend and nothing more! Can you not understand that….” Christine yelled, grasping her frizzed out and tangled blonde hair in frustration, tears welling up in her eyes. She paced about the living room that lay in shambles, which seemed to be the usual atmosphere that they lived in both physically and mentally. Everything falling apart yet holding on by a few strings. Christine and Ned had been together for years of mixed emotions. There were times when their love brought them happiness in their chaotic lives, but in the end their love was forgotten whenever another utility bill slipped into the mail box or when a pink slip was issued instead of a pay check to pay for the groceries. To a spectator it must seem like a miracle that they even felt anything towards each other but as they say, everyone has their reasons.


“Sure! And ol’ friends’ just like to spontaneously suck each others faces off in broken down diners!? Yeah, really buddy buddy with him aren’t you!? What do you do with your best friends!? Have sex in an alley!?” Ned was either on the bridge of tears or of smacking her upside the head and spinning it a full 360 degrees. Lights sprung on from the neighbors mobile home next door, shining through the cheap thin plastic that adorn their window frame as a cost effective alternative glass. In their house glass had a tendency to shatter when a lamp, chair, or antique Eskimo was thrown at it. “Ned, I would never do such a thing! You are taking things way out of perspective! You need to come down…“ she said as she tried to wall across the cold concrete floor to take the bottle of beer out his hand. Even though hindered by alcohol, he could see her intentions and awkwardly shoved her into the couch with one hand. “How could you even think of such a thing…” she broke out in tears and sobbed on the couch and Ned stomped into the kitchen although grazing his shoulder on the wall and sending him self stumbling forward to land face first on the rotten wood floor. If only Ned could have understood what life was like for her. Christine had numerous bruises and crisscrosses of scars from their past fights. What love they had once had was destroyed, yet she refused to leave his life and always tried to make things work out. Christine had heard a saying once, “What you know the best you observe the least”, which seemed to be true in life from her past experiences.


They had known each other for years and had been good friends before Ned finally mustered up the courage to ask her out. Things had gone a little fast but she enjoyed it all. Christine had thought she knew everything about the sweet charming man with eyes of brown so dark that they seemed to be endless wells. They say that the eyes are the window to the soul, but the man she knew was just one side of him. Ned had a drinking problem but she simply shrugged it off, considering it just a little quark of his personality that she could get use to and deal with, but things soon got out of hand. At night he would often sneak out of the house and drink with his friends and in the morning he would wake up with a hangover that seemed to last for days. Soon, Christine learned that his brown eyes of such depth were not the window to a endless well of opportunity, but the window to an endless well of shit.


“You know that I would never dream of being unfaithful to you…” she said, tenderly rubbing her plump belly. “For the sake of our child, it needs you and I.” Christine had been pregnant for nearly 6 months with their child. It was what kept her hanging onto him, knowing that a single mother could not hold a job and that maybe a child would change Ned for the better. A life was growing within her and she wanted to give it every possible opportunity even if it meant living with a drunken ogre. Ned stood silent for a moment as the stench of alcohol blew through the air and his glazed over eyes squinted in anger. Christine reached out to hold his hand but slowly, he turned before making his way calmly through the plastic screen door outside to leave her alone with slam of the car door and the roar of the engine. Screeching out of the driveway, hitting a rock on the side leaving a scratch at least three feet long which he would rather worry about later.


The years seemed to blur together, all the fighting, drinking, yelling, and screaming was all he could remember. They never did anything special even on holidays and neither of them had take a vacation from work since they had found out their son was on the way. “She doesn’t love me, she only wants me to be a father to her kid. That’s the only reason we have not fallen apart like we should have years ago, because of that soon to be little brat.” It was a pitch dark moonless night down that road with not a headlight to be seen for miles. Ned had been down this road soo many times that he could have drove it in his sleep. “Fucking bitch…” he swore under his breath before taking another swig from his flask.


Suddenly out of the blue, a brand new sports car appeared in his rearview mirror honking its horn and blasting the radio loud enough to cause vibrations in Ned’s seat. “God damn kids!” he said as he pulled the window down. The handle for the window had broken off last week so he had to pry it down with his hand to stick his arm out and wave the person on. The Ferrari caught up and the driver rolled down his passenger window “Hey drunkey! Get the fuck off the road! Your gonna kill someone!” The driver seemed hardly 18 years old. Ned never really liked teens and he was already pissed off as it was. He looked the teen in the eye and yelled “Shut the hell up! I’ll do whatever I god damn you please you mother fucking bast!….” before he could finish cussing the man out he suddenly turned to the left, out of shouting distance and down a different road.


“Yeah that’s what I thought…” Rubbing his eyes and blinking a couple times, the world went into total darkness and a silence that rang in his ears. It seemed like he was floating in outer space yet all of the infinite suns of the universe had blown out, leaving a eternal darkness. Feeling a sense of weightlessness and freedom, he was slammed back into reality as what felt like a bull ramming head first at full steam into his chest. Blurred outlines of trees and terrified squirrels multiplied within his eyesight as the sickening crunch of metal and whiplash brought him to the reality of his situation settled in. Smoke billowed out from under the hood of the rusted station wagon that was now fused to the tree after the impact. Opening the door and staggering from the twisted heap of metal, clothes reeking of rum as he dripped with the contents of his now crumpled flask that lay underneath the heap.

To be continued...