The Incident
by Jordan Safranski
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
by Jordan Safranski
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
He was at the store with his mom, trailing behind her as he had been trailing behind everyone for weeks, barely knowing how to keep his numb body moving if someone else wasn’t leading the way.
He hadn’t wanted to come, for reasons his mom should have thought of if she really knew him as well as she’d been claiming since the accident, but she was insistent. Some bullshit about getting out of the house and being around other people and the “power of a new perspective” that was clearly straight out of the “I’ve never actually lost anyone but I have a degree that says I know how to deal with grief” handbook she’d been reading ever since he’d stopped getting out of bed. Everything reminded him of headlights and broken glass and people who get in their cars and go for a drive when they’re completely obliterated. But even though he hated the filler therapist his mom had become, hated the gleam of the grocery store tiles that reminded him of the gasoline-slick road, he hadn’t been able to tell her. If he hurt one more person he would burst.
So that’s how he ended up shuffling along the painfully familiar, gasoline-slick floors, the ones he kept dreaming about, while his mom chirped on about how nice it was to have him along with her as she picked carefully through items he knew they already had at home.
A can of baked beans for the barbeque that never happened, Gogurt for Sadie, and as many Red Bulls as he could feasibly buy without his mom getting annoyed when her credit statement showed up. That was what he’d been getting, the last time he was there. With Her. She died so his mom could feel good about having “cooked” something for a family gathering, and so that he could pull all-nighters and still make it through class. She diedso that Sadie could have some goddamn yogurt that she didn’t even like that much.
“Will?” He looked up from the gleaming tiles that had started to swim and tried not to wince at the concern he was growing so tired of seeing stuck to his mom’s face. He blinked and failed to answer whatever she’d asked him when he’d been too lost in thought to comprehend her words. He could feel her indecision, to pretend like it hadn’t happened or to address it. He wondered what her book would have said about it, but he was too tired to care, or to bother guessing which she’d choose, or which he wanted her to choose.
Instead, he got lost in the cavern of skin that had formed between her eyebrows. He wondered if she was in there, somewhere, the mom she used to be before it all happened and Grieving Boy’s Keeper took over instead. He wondered if Sadie noticed it too, that Mom had left and didn’t seem to be coming back, and another small piece of him felt as though it was being chipped away at the thought. His guilt was a pickaxe, each blow harder and swifter than the last. He wondered if someone would find some tiny part of him, lying on the linoleum floor between the canned goods and the condiments.
“How about you go pick up some shampoo?” His mom said lightly, an octave too high. He could see the worry in her eyes, it never left, but he was more relieved than he thought he would be that she decided to let his momentary mental absence drop. He nodded.
“Sure, Mom.” He sighed, a little tension dripping off his shoulders as he took a few steps away from the worry buzzing around her. She smiled lightly as she watched him, but she didn’t put as much effort in as usual, and it came out looking sad and out of place—someone’s first attempt at Photoshop.
“Sadie probably needs some too,” she added as he continued to back down the aisle.
“Probably,” he replied, speaking softly around the lump in his throat before turning around and leaving his mom staring at the baked beans he prayed she wouldn’t buy. It was one of the things that lingered, an image always behind his eyelids.
He’d watched the bits of goop and bean particle drip from the seats as he hung suspended, trapped by his seatbelt. He’d watched as their blood mixed with the brown slime. He’d wondered how he hadn’t known before how strongly it smelled—blood. Stronger than the manufactured, smoky essence of hickory-smoked bacon bits. Stronger than the gasoline emptying itself onto the pavement around their metal confinement, a slick, golden pool he could have drowned in, if only he hadn’t been held in by the damn seatbelt. He prayed again that she would leave the beans. Again. Again.
He prayed at least eight times to a god he either hated or didn’t believe in, he had not yet decided which, by the time he finally made it to the shampoo. So many bottles he could make a mountain out of them and climb far away, where there weren’t worried moms or baked beans or drunk drivers.
A twisted knot wrapped itself into the shallow space of his stomach that wasn’t an empty, gaping hole as he scanned the aisle, slightly terrified and incredibly pissed off. Decisions were impossible, and constant, and it was too unfair that he couldn’t escape it, the feeling that wouldn’t let him breathe, even in the shampoo aisle—a decidedly breathable place.
He tilted his head back and let out a breath that should have been long, and even, and not at all shaky. He stared at the fluorescent lights and seared the swirling water from his eyes. He breathed. He breathed and he wondered how he had ended up there. Not there, in the shampoo aisle of the convenience store down the street from his house. But there, in the last place he could have told Her he loved Her but had slapped Her ass and bought Her a Kit Kat bar instead. He hoped She knew. That She had known.
He straightened his neck and peered back down at the bottles which now had black splotches swirling over them, tattoos of the lights stamped into his vision.
He picked a bottle at random and flipped the plastic cap up with his thumb, unimpressed with the usually satisfying click as it popped open. He squeezed it under his nose and immediately capped it and put it back after being smacked in the face with a pungent scent that would have convinced him his little sister had morphed into a rose bush (and not a great one) if she started using it.
He picked up another and another, smelling at least five different types of vanilla and orange and whatever the hell a hibiscus was, but none of them smelled the way his sister was supposed to smell.
He walked until he reached the middle of the isle, pausing as he picked up a bottle that seemed vaguely familiar enough to have been one of Sadie’s old shampoos that he’d glanced at once. But he was wrong about where he’d seen it, why his hand shook as he popped the top off, and if he’d been paying any attention at all, he might have realized it right before the smell hit his nose. He might have put it back, picked a different bottle, and ran back to the shelter of ketchup and mustard and even baked beans that didn’t smell anything like Her. Like Veronica.
It was strange, he thought, that he could remember the smell of blood so clearly when other things were so hard. He couldn’t remember what his house smelled like, or the ocean they took vacations to every summer, or the exact smell of the cookies his mom made just about every week because she didn’t know how to cook anything else. And Her. In all the time that had passed, in the days that dragged on and flew by as he lay in his bed and cried and screamed and threw things and broke things and tried to care about fixing things, and dreamt and thought of Her, he hadn’t realized. Veronica had slipped away, replaced by the ghost of shadowy memories that would never be good enough.
He hadn’t even realized that he’d forgotten until he squeezed the shampoo bottle that he should have put down and remembered. It was one of his favorite things, the way Veronica had smelled. Like the beach—ocean, like summer and heat and sunlight, like frozen drinks and drunken nights and the breeze. He never told her how he’d refuse to wash his pillow cases after she slept over until the smell had dissipated. How he used to press his nose to his shoulder where she would rest her head, just for a second, and catch a hint of it, of her. He hadn’t told her that either.
He squeezed the bottle again and immediately fought the urge to vomit. Because it smelled like Her-but-not-Her. Something was missing, something she took with her, the difference between Veronica and Her. His breathing became ragged and quick, and the nausea was building up and the aisles were starting to tilt. He stumbled to the shelves but they weren’t solid enough to hold the bottles and him, and they swayed under his weight.
He tried to close his eyes to evade the swirling tiles beneath his feet, screaming at him to spew the lunch he didn’t eat onto them, but when he shut his eyes all he could see was the car. He felt the seat belt digging into his side, leaving the scars that still remained. He smelled the blood and the oil and the goddamn bacon bits. He smelled Her. He saw Her, hanging there--
The paramedic’s hand at his shoulder came out from the depths beyond his car, to pull him out and take him away from Her, too soon, too late. Will tried to push the man away but found he couldn’t move, so he hung there, strung up and immobile like an animal snared in a trap. He hadn’t remembered the blood smelling like that before. He started to take in what lay beyond his shattered window. Bodies swarmed like ants—paramedics, firefighters, strangers he didn’t recognize come to watch the show. Sirens screeched and feet hit pavement and the awful sound of crunching metal was so loud it seemed to vibrate the air around him. Someone screamed.
“Will!” He opened his eyes in time to see his mother clutching her arm he’d just slapped away in his momentary stupor. She started at him like she was seeing him for the first time, with horror and surprise at who her son had become, in the center of the small crowd that had formed around where he’d ended up, lying on the floor with the bottle of Her shampoo in his hands. He didn’t have time to ask what the fuck they thought they were all looking at before his stomach tried to empty itself.
He dry-heaved. He dry-heaved again. Again. Again. He forced his eyes to stay open to escape the horror that waited in the darkness. He peered into the sea of eyes that looked on with a disgusted sort of intrigue. He probably would have been one of them, before. Before.
He’d been a man before. He’d been strong, and did a pretty good job at pretending not to care about things, and he didn’t take shit from anybody, and he didn’t pine over women or admit to himself that they smelled like summer, and he sure as hell didn’t have emotional breakdowns in the middle of the shampoo aisle. He would have fought someone for looking at him the way everyone was looking at him now.
He was just a shell now—the empty remains of the places Veronica had taken up inside him—without warning, without permission. He hadn’t realized all that he had given until it was gone and all he was left with were all the miserable things he had kept for himself. He was as much a ghost as he wished Veronica could be.
“Will,” his mother cried, really cried, her whole body shaking. He looked into her eyes, at the black rivers of mascara marking her cheeks, and he wanted to say he was sorry. For wrecking the first car she’d ever bought him, for being a shitty brother to Sadie, for blaming her. It was what he was most sorry for, and it was why he couldn’t say it. She didn’t look like his mom anymore. The grocery list she’d handed him that night, before he got in the car, before he picked up Veronica, before everything was gone in a second, was all he saw when he looked at her.
So he turned away from the murmuring crowd and away from his mother. Away from whatever life he didn’t want ahead of him. He turned and lay against the ground, wishing with everything he had that a human could die of self-loathing as he sobbed against the tiles, squeezing the shampoo bottle until it was spilling out onto the floor the way the oil had spewed onto the road that night, leaking from the demolished hunk of metal and blood.
The smell of it surrounded him, and he closed his eyes, and he watched Her crushed body—a masterpiece he’d memorized every inch of, demolished in front of him—hang, and he thought of what V would think if she could have seen him then. He wondered what she would have already forgotten if it had been him.
He hadn’t wanted to come, for reasons his mom should have thought of if she really knew him as well as she’d been claiming since the accident, but she was insistent. Some bullshit about getting out of the house and being around other people and the “power of a new perspective” that was clearly straight out of the “I’ve never actually lost anyone but I have a degree that says I know how to deal with grief” handbook she’d been reading ever since he’d stopped getting out of bed. Everything reminded him of headlights and broken glass and people who get in their cars and go for a drive when they’re completely obliterated. But even though he hated the filler therapist his mom had become, hated the gleam of the grocery store tiles that reminded him of the gasoline-slick road, he hadn’t been able to tell her. If he hurt one more person he would burst.
So that’s how he ended up shuffling along the painfully familiar, gasoline-slick floors, the ones he kept dreaming about, while his mom chirped on about how nice it was to have him along with her as she picked carefully through items he knew they already had at home.
A can of baked beans for the barbeque that never happened, Gogurt for Sadie, and as many Red Bulls as he could feasibly buy without his mom getting annoyed when her credit statement showed up. That was what he’d been getting, the last time he was there. With Her. She died so his mom could feel good about having “cooked” something for a family gathering, and so that he could pull all-nighters and still make it through class. She diedso that Sadie could have some goddamn yogurt that she didn’t even like that much.
“Will?” He looked up from the gleaming tiles that had started to swim and tried not to wince at the concern he was growing so tired of seeing stuck to his mom’s face. He blinked and failed to answer whatever she’d asked him when he’d been too lost in thought to comprehend her words. He could feel her indecision, to pretend like it hadn’t happened or to address it. He wondered what her book would have said about it, but he was too tired to care, or to bother guessing which she’d choose, or which he wanted her to choose.
Instead, he got lost in the cavern of skin that had formed between her eyebrows. He wondered if she was in there, somewhere, the mom she used to be before it all happened and Grieving Boy’s Keeper took over instead. He wondered if Sadie noticed it too, that Mom had left and didn’t seem to be coming back, and another small piece of him felt as though it was being chipped away at the thought. His guilt was a pickaxe, each blow harder and swifter than the last. He wondered if someone would find some tiny part of him, lying on the linoleum floor between the canned goods and the condiments.
“How about you go pick up some shampoo?” His mom said lightly, an octave too high. He could see the worry in her eyes, it never left, but he was more relieved than he thought he would be that she decided to let his momentary mental absence drop. He nodded.
“Sure, Mom.” He sighed, a little tension dripping off his shoulders as he took a few steps away from the worry buzzing around her. She smiled lightly as she watched him, but she didn’t put as much effort in as usual, and it came out looking sad and out of place—someone’s first attempt at Photoshop.
“Sadie probably needs some too,” she added as he continued to back down the aisle.
“Probably,” he replied, speaking softly around the lump in his throat before turning around and leaving his mom staring at the baked beans he prayed she wouldn’t buy. It was one of the things that lingered, an image always behind his eyelids.
He’d watched the bits of goop and bean particle drip from the seats as he hung suspended, trapped by his seatbelt. He’d watched as their blood mixed with the brown slime. He’d wondered how he hadn’t known before how strongly it smelled—blood. Stronger than the manufactured, smoky essence of hickory-smoked bacon bits. Stronger than the gasoline emptying itself onto the pavement around their metal confinement, a slick, golden pool he could have drowned in, if only he hadn’t been held in by the damn seatbelt. He prayed again that she would leave the beans. Again. Again.
He prayed at least eight times to a god he either hated or didn’t believe in, he had not yet decided which, by the time he finally made it to the shampoo. So many bottles he could make a mountain out of them and climb far away, where there weren’t worried moms or baked beans or drunk drivers.
A twisted knot wrapped itself into the shallow space of his stomach that wasn’t an empty, gaping hole as he scanned the aisle, slightly terrified and incredibly pissed off. Decisions were impossible, and constant, and it was too unfair that he couldn’t escape it, the feeling that wouldn’t let him breathe, even in the shampoo aisle—a decidedly breathable place.
He tilted his head back and let out a breath that should have been long, and even, and not at all shaky. He stared at the fluorescent lights and seared the swirling water from his eyes. He breathed. He breathed and he wondered how he had ended up there. Not there, in the shampoo aisle of the convenience store down the street from his house. But there, in the last place he could have told Her he loved Her but had slapped Her ass and bought Her a Kit Kat bar instead. He hoped She knew. That She had known.
He straightened his neck and peered back down at the bottles which now had black splotches swirling over them, tattoos of the lights stamped into his vision.
He picked a bottle at random and flipped the plastic cap up with his thumb, unimpressed with the usually satisfying click as it popped open. He squeezed it under his nose and immediately capped it and put it back after being smacked in the face with a pungent scent that would have convinced him his little sister had morphed into a rose bush (and not a great one) if she started using it.
He picked up another and another, smelling at least five different types of vanilla and orange and whatever the hell a hibiscus was, but none of them smelled the way his sister was supposed to smell.
He walked until he reached the middle of the isle, pausing as he picked up a bottle that seemed vaguely familiar enough to have been one of Sadie’s old shampoos that he’d glanced at once. But he was wrong about where he’d seen it, why his hand shook as he popped the top off, and if he’d been paying any attention at all, he might have realized it right before the smell hit his nose. He might have put it back, picked a different bottle, and ran back to the shelter of ketchup and mustard and even baked beans that didn’t smell anything like Her. Like Veronica.
It was strange, he thought, that he could remember the smell of blood so clearly when other things were so hard. He couldn’t remember what his house smelled like, or the ocean they took vacations to every summer, or the exact smell of the cookies his mom made just about every week because she didn’t know how to cook anything else. And Her. In all the time that had passed, in the days that dragged on and flew by as he lay in his bed and cried and screamed and threw things and broke things and tried to care about fixing things, and dreamt and thought of Her, he hadn’t realized. Veronica had slipped away, replaced by the ghost of shadowy memories that would never be good enough.
He hadn’t even realized that he’d forgotten until he squeezed the shampoo bottle that he should have put down and remembered. It was one of his favorite things, the way Veronica had smelled. Like the beach—ocean, like summer and heat and sunlight, like frozen drinks and drunken nights and the breeze. He never told her how he’d refuse to wash his pillow cases after she slept over until the smell had dissipated. How he used to press his nose to his shoulder where she would rest her head, just for a second, and catch a hint of it, of her. He hadn’t told her that either.
He squeezed the bottle again and immediately fought the urge to vomit. Because it smelled like Her-but-not-Her. Something was missing, something she took with her, the difference between Veronica and Her. His breathing became ragged and quick, and the nausea was building up and the aisles were starting to tilt. He stumbled to the shelves but they weren’t solid enough to hold the bottles and him, and they swayed under his weight.
He tried to close his eyes to evade the swirling tiles beneath his feet, screaming at him to spew the lunch he didn’t eat onto them, but when he shut his eyes all he could see was the car. He felt the seat belt digging into his side, leaving the scars that still remained. He smelled the blood and the oil and the goddamn bacon bits. He smelled Her. He saw Her, hanging there--
The paramedic’s hand at his shoulder came out from the depths beyond his car, to pull him out and take him away from Her, too soon, too late. Will tried to push the man away but found he couldn’t move, so he hung there, strung up and immobile like an animal snared in a trap. He hadn’t remembered the blood smelling like that before. He started to take in what lay beyond his shattered window. Bodies swarmed like ants—paramedics, firefighters, strangers he didn’t recognize come to watch the show. Sirens screeched and feet hit pavement and the awful sound of crunching metal was so loud it seemed to vibrate the air around him. Someone screamed.
“Will!” He opened his eyes in time to see his mother clutching her arm he’d just slapped away in his momentary stupor. She started at him like she was seeing him for the first time, with horror and surprise at who her son had become, in the center of the small crowd that had formed around where he’d ended up, lying on the floor with the bottle of Her shampoo in his hands. He didn’t have time to ask what the fuck they thought they were all looking at before his stomach tried to empty itself.
He dry-heaved. He dry-heaved again. Again. Again. He forced his eyes to stay open to escape the horror that waited in the darkness. He peered into the sea of eyes that looked on with a disgusted sort of intrigue. He probably would have been one of them, before. Before.
He’d been a man before. He’d been strong, and did a pretty good job at pretending not to care about things, and he didn’t take shit from anybody, and he didn’t pine over women or admit to himself that they smelled like summer, and he sure as hell didn’t have emotional breakdowns in the middle of the shampoo aisle. He would have fought someone for looking at him the way everyone was looking at him now.
He was just a shell now—the empty remains of the places Veronica had taken up inside him—without warning, without permission. He hadn’t realized all that he had given until it was gone and all he was left with were all the miserable things he had kept for himself. He was as much a ghost as he wished Veronica could be.
“Will,” his mother cried, really cried, her whole body shaking. He looked into her eyes, at the black rivers of mascara marking her cheeks, and he wanted to say he was sorry. For wrecking the first car she’d ever bought him, for being a shitty brother to Sadie, for blaming her. It was what he was most sorry for, and it was why he couldn’t say it. She didn’t look like his mom anymore. The grocery list she’d handed him that night, before he got in the car, before he picked up Veronica, before everything was gone in a second, was all he saw when he looked at her.
So he turned away from the murmuring crowd and away from his mother. Away from whatever life he didn’t want ahead of him. He turned and lay against the ground, wishing with everything he had that a human could die of self-loathing as he sobbed against the tiles, squeezing the shampoo bottle until it was spilling out onto the floor the way the oil had spewed onto the road that night, leaking from the demolished hunk of metal and blood.
The smell of it surrounded him, and he closed his eyes, and he watched Her crushed body—a masterpiece he’d memorized every inch of, demolished in front of him—hang, and he thought of what V would think if she could have seen him then. He wondered what she would have already forgotten if it had been him.
Jordan Safranski works as a literary advocate and majors in English at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where she is writing the novel from which "The Incident" is excerpted. Her work has also appeared in Sheepshead Review.