Night and Day

Chapter 6: Delilah

I was startled suddenly from my work. There was the rush of voices and cries from around me. I could hear my neighbours shouting and one woman's voice was screeching, like the wheels of a car. There was the squeal of rubber...to be followed by a deafening crash. I could not move.

"Oh my god," someone shouted.

I forced myself to take a step, and then another. Outside my front door I saw the wreckage, a smoldering heap of glinting blue metal. Inside the car-or what was left of it-were two people, a man and a woman. The man sat at the driver's seat; his salt and pepper hair was receding, but it was stained pink by the blood. He was still breathing, but only just. The woman was not moving.

My neighbor, Danny, was examining the crash, his eyes wide. Already multiple people were on their phones, calling an ambulance. I said nothing, but glanced toward my house instead. Rupert, my dog, was going ballistic. He was barking and biting, tearing at our couch.

"Rupert!" I snapped. "Stop it!"

The small chocolate dog answered me with a kind of grumbled growl. Then he was barking again, sprinting and hopping about the living room as he did.

I sighed in defeat. "Stupid dog."

"How did this happen?" Danny asked. He had the man cradled in his arms now and he was using his jacket to stave off the bleeding. The man groaned. Vaguely I wondered what his name was.

"He must have slipped on the ice." Danny's wife, a squat woman whose name I did not know, was trailing her foot over a particularly slippery patch.

"Damn city. Plow should have been here a month ago," Danny muttered. "Where's that ambulance?"

"She's not breathing," Mrs. Danny observed.

"Poor man." Danny shook his head.

I shivered, and Danny glanced at me.

"Are your parents' home?"

I shook my head. "They don't get home until late."

"Damn. Okay. Sadie?"

Mrs. Danny turned her head. "Dan?"

"Go inside now. You'll catch cold. I'm going to try and stay here with this fellow."

"Oh, but I can't go inside," Sadie stammered. "I...I just won't."

"Then don't. But go inside and come back out, with a jacket."

"Okay. I'll bring two. You..."

"Yes." Danny was barely listening to her now. The man in his arms was growing paler and his breaths were beginning to slow.

I turned away and went inside; from the window I watched Danny and the man, restraining Rupert all the while. After ten minutes, the ambulance arrived and medical personal rushed out to extract the woman from the vehicle. Danny allowed two nurses to carefully carry the man to a stretcher and the man's wife followed suit, though, by the look in their eyes, I could tell that the team saw little hope for her. I wondered if the woman even was the man's wife, but a part of me knew that she was. Outside, on top of the picnic table in my backyard, my dire tale waited patiently for my return.

I knew how the accident had occurred. I knew all the details; I knew that it went beyond the ice. The man and that woman had been arguing. They had been yelling at one another over the most ridiculous of things, barely paying heed to the world around them. Joe had struggled to keep his concentration as Claire screamed at him, and now Joe was on a stretcher, his wife dead.

I mentioned the accident to my parents after they arrived late that night, but I confessed to having no inclination as to why it had occurred. They would never have believed the truth, at any rate, and I could scarcely believe it myself. Had I really...but no. It was impossible. What I suspected was beyond the laws of our world; it would suggest that magic was real, and I knew that it could not be. Our world was built upon basic scientific principles and, while I believed in some of the supernatural, I harboured no delusions of there truly being super powers. If there were, there should have been more known phenomena.

"Oh, Nathan called," my dad told me, glancing up from his phone. I stared. "He can't hang out tomorrow."

"Oh." This came as no surprise. Nathan had been rather reclusive as of late and I was not about to pry. If he wanted to get some distance from his kid sister, that was fine by me; so long as this self-imposed seclusion was short, I was willing to overlook it. However, in the event that a few days turned into a few weeks, I was willing to flood his voicemail, such as it was, with enough messages to drown a man. Nathan had never been able to ignore his family indefinitely.

I collapsed into bed that night, exhausted. I had deleted the story, finding it distasteful in light of current events. Part of me hoped that banishing it from existence might undo it altogether, but I knew there was to be no help for it. The woman was dead. Claire was dead and Joe was alone. I punched my pillow. I considered never writing again. I decided against writing anything unpleasant, at the very least. I did not know the extent of my powers-nor if they existed or not. I was not eager to find out.

When I closed my eyes, I saw only blue. I saw the ice in eyes and on road; I saw the blue in the former and the blue on the latter, the final shards of a blue car strewn about. Kaitlyn's gaze burned into me, accusatory. The car was steaming and the woman-Claire-ceased to move. I grew quite sedentary; I did not move at all, even as sleep refused to take me.