Ahead of us, there was an eerily calm, complicated scene of lights and vehicles interrupting the foggy blackness of the August night. We were driving home from my best friend’s house, exhausted from hours of swimming, barbecuing, and playing board games with her family and mine, a tradition started in elementary school that remained even though we were in college. In addition to her parents, mine, and my sixteen-year-old brother, now our long-time boyfriends participated; mine, the other half of “we”, sitting in the driver’s seat.
“Was there an accident?” I asked, peeling my eyes away to search his profile for answers. His forehead creased and his sand-colored, stubble-covered jawline tensed. I couldn’t make out the freckles dotting his nose and cheeks or the warm chocolate color of his eyes as he focused straight ahead, not responding to my nervous energy, as he sometimes doesn’t when he’s navigating a tense situation.
Patience isn’t my virtue of choice, but I allowed the silence to continue. I shifted in the passenger seat and craned my neck, feeling the weight of this slow-motion apprehension cover us like a heavy blanket. His foot let up until we had come to a stop, following suit of the car in front of his small, red truck. I turned to look behind us, searching for my parents. I could only see the headlights of my mother’s car, so I turned back to the accident in front of us.
A white truck was flashing lights on the left; emergency response? There was a police car on the right and another stopped car. Or were there two? There were men on the right, down in the grassy ditch, with flashlights. Some were wearing bright safety vests and one, whom I briefly registered as Amish, had a full beard and a white t-shirt tucked into blue polyester pants.
The exterior tranquility didn’t match the chaos in my brain as my eyes squinted through the night, panning from the left grassy ditch, over the faded, cracking asphalt to the right ditch, dipping before it became the front lawn of a distant double-wide. I realized that it wasn’t that too much was happening for me to take in; it was that so much had already happened, and we’d had the misfortune to stumble upon the aftermath—the moment when people trudge forward and grimly make decisions about how to clean up catastrophe.
I only made the connection to the Amish man after we inched closer and I asked what the dark figure close to the ground was.
“It’s a horse. Can’t you see it?”
At his words, my eyes found the animal: dark, brown, and still. If I hadn’t also suddenly seen the demolished wooden cart or most of one of its back legs torn off and lying on the road with the rest of the wrecked wooden pieces, I would’ve thought the horse was simply lying there. Its head was raised, eyes showing a deep sentience, unblinking, just waiting.
KRISTEN NICHOLS received her BA in Nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago. She was formerly Copy Chief for The Columbia Chronicle and Editor-in-Chief of The Lab Review. Her work can be read on The Lab Review Blog, 101words.org, and columbiachronicle.com.