Backlight Country
by Travis Dahlke
While I waited for the bus in the morning I would communicate with car accident victims in my head, asking them questions like:
What song were you listening to and how long was the pre-chorus?
How would you rate the pain from zero to ten?
If you were drunk and/or high when you crashed, does that mean you're drunk and/or high for all eternity?
Death Death’s Curve was a hairpin turn waiting at the bottom of our driveway. My dad said it was actually 167-degrees. He measured it once with a length of yarn. Its bloodlust hadn't slowed down since two poultry farmers killed one another on horse-drawn carts. Last summer, an off-duty lumber trucker lost control of his motorcycle. Just a couple months ago, some juniors driving around with a twelve pack of Corona flipped their truck over three times in a row, like they were doing a figure skating trick. Lucky for them, they all got out in time before the truck's freshly-pressed flame decals burst into real flames. A year before I was born, a soap opera actor went through his windshield while he was in town to purchase a dog. My town was known for having the best Bernese Mountain Dogs in the world.
The DANGEROUS CURVE AHEAD sign had been run over so many times that they stopped putting it back up. A stone wall bordered the road, where smashed cars created a collage of different color paints over the years. The worst accidents managed to erase previous marks. My mom called the curve, Golgotha: the place of the skull. I heard her say it once when she thought no one was listening. I heard the Bernese Mountain puppy the dead soap opera actor bought escaped the accident to live in the wild. At the senior center they leave bowls of potato chips out for it.
I dreaded daylight savings when I had to wait in the freezing darkness of the morning. This always made the spirits braver. They’d ask me things like:
What happened in the season 3 finale of Mad About You?
Can you check if that thing I buried under the Scoville Park baseball field is still there?
Did you know my daughter is married to a real Count?
One time a lady ran her minivan into the stonewall at full speed. She was crushed by her steering column. My brother cried when he saw the guts. I didn’t tell him the guts were just her groceries splattered on the pavement. The next day I found the lady’s wig in a puddle of Ragu and sometimes wore it to sleep and watched television in it when no one else was home.
Before my brother went to work as a stockbroker, he too waited for the bus at Death Death’s Curve. He claimed Death Death’s Curve was most definitely not Golgotha, that it was only a shit-paved farm road with zero visibility. He said he started hearing the victims around my age. He told me he sometimes flirted with them if a voice sounded cute enough, because you’re immediately single in the afterlife, despite what they say at weddings. He told me there used to be cows on the other side of the wall that would shepherd the victims to hell.
“That’s why sometimes you’d see one cow walk away from the group, circle back and continue chewing up grass,” he said.
My questions for my brother were:
Why did all of the car accident victims go to hell?
Who guides them now since the cows are gone?
Did you know my daughter is married to a real Count?
One Christmas Eve, when this drunk guy crashed his pickup, my dad and grandfather went outside to help him. They were also drunk. But they helped the guy get away in time before any cops showed up. On New Year’s Day, an H&R Block accountant—who stood to inherit millions of dollars from a distant aunt—was decapitated in his Subaru. What people don’t know about decapitations is that the head doesn’t always leave the body, it can come off still within the skin sheathing of one’s neck. The firefighters at the scene referred to this victim as “Stretch Armstrong,” which the accountant took great umbrage to. A lot of the victims told me things the first responders said about their mangled or charred bodies. They told me they wished they remembered more good things.
To the people it took, Death Death’s Curve is just another curve in their life. To everyone else, it’s some kind of sacred, breathing ground. It was here their whole life, as patient as can be, and even when you’re safe inside your house, wavering over leftover chicken cutlets and someone is driving their van down the road to a song on the radio with a trunk-full of groceries, you can almost hear forty people say at once: It really is a nice day out, but you gotta go.
Travis Dahlke lives in Middletown, Connecticut. His fiction has appeared in Joyland Magazine, Outlook Springs, Sporklet, and The Longleaf Review, among other literary journals and collections. His novella, Milkshake, is forthcoming from Long Day Press.
