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- 02/23/2013
- 580 Words
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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
2013 - Spring - A Night To Remember Entry
Six Seconds - 6. Six
Five years back and a hundred kilometres away. Sage was still sixteen. He was bandaged and homeless and he was alone, driving a car down a highway in the middle of the night, a single duffel bag in the backseat, leaving the one person he had ever cared about behind. Yet, hope still filled him. His tears stopped, and he reached to retrieve a cigarette from the side pocket of the car door. In Sage's mind, Callen's face was preserved forever; seventeen and golden, vulnerable in the moonlight, and that vision pained him more than ever. But what really mattered was that Callen was happy when Sage had left.
New Seatrouver, Sage thought suddenly. He would stop by New Seatrouver to see if there were any jobs he could do.
He cranked up the radio, blinking tears of exhaustion from his eyes, but Sage wouldn't notice until, too late, the drunk driver heading straight at him at a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour in the opposite direction at the wide curve up ahead.
An ear-shattering scream of horns. The world shook once and then Sage's rusty Volvo smashed to a stop.
The nose of the car had collapsed in a split second of crushing violence, and Sage was pinned to his steering wheel. He lay there, limp, his seat shrouded in curtains of blood, his thoracic cage compressed flat, his internal organs relaxed and still. His life torn asunder in a fleeting moment of impact.
And although Sage was dead by nearly all physiological standpoints, the neurons in his cortex blinked weakly, communicating to each other in rapid-fire for the entirety of six seconds, flashing and diverging into a million forking paths like a school of firefly squid creating bioluminescent labyrinths near the ocean shore.
In the individual streams of some of those divergences, Sage had decided to stop at the side of the road to sleep, and the drunk driver had passed on by. Sage would reach New Seatrouver by the morning. He would find a job, an apartment, and live the rest of his life in solitude. In other paths still, Sage had decided to go west to Portland to enjoy the city before it sank underneath the ocean, instead, never to see Callen again as well. In some, they would instead, reunite when they were fifty five and fifty six, each married, with two children each, and depart on their separate ways.
In other branches, the roads would end for them, blinking out in a lightning flash of blue. Sage would learn that Callen had died driving off an unmanned road off the side of a popular ski resort, and in other ones, Sage was left wishing he had another moment with Callen as he lay pinned in a flipped car at the side of the highway.
Yet in a select few realities where they both remained alive and well, Callen would find Sage six months later at his stay in New Seatrouver, red-faced and furious. They would shout and fight and curse, and in some, Callen would leave to never come back.
But in one, he would stay. They would make up, move in, and spend the better half of their days together. And Callen would finally get the chance to drive Sage out to see the rural night skies, alit with nothing else other than a billion glowing nebulas and possibilities.
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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
2013 - Spring - A Night To Remember Entry
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