I was going to replace the tires. Well, at least I was going to replace the two bald ones on the front end of the car. That was why I was driving to work. To earn the money to replace the tires.
As a person of extremely limited means, I had to live the golden distance from work. The golden distance is the distance between the location where you can afford to live and the employment that pays enough for you to live there. It was a 5.7 mile drive, but would be a 13.2 mile journey if I were to take public transportation.
I wasn’t the only one from my neighborhood to take this route to where the grass was greener. On the day in question, I saw a beat-up diesel dumptruck in front of me. It prowled the streets the day before every heavy trash day to stop and comb through the detritus for anything that could be recycled or repaired and sold.
The truck pulled to the side of the road ahead of me and, as I was about to pass it, the driver’s side door opened. I jerked the wheel to the left to avoid an impact and then back to the right to avoid oncoming traffic in the other lane. Both front tires blew and the momentum caused the car to stand on its nose. For one all-encompassing second, I was staring through the windshield straight down at the pavement. Then the rear of the car came forward, completing the somersault, and it landed on its roof with a sickening crunch.
Thank goodness I’m short, I thought when I realized that the car roof had been compressed to the point that it was a fraction of an inch above my head. An old woman crouched down beside the car and said, “put your hands up and press them against the roof.” I did so and she reached up through the space where the window used to be and pressed the button to release the latch on my seatbelt. Thanks to her I was able to lower myself slowly and safely instead of having my head driven into the roof by my body weight. She helped me crawl out through the window and, as soon as I took a few steps away, pools of oil and gas that had been released by the impact ignited and exploded. Tears came to my eyes as I realized just how close I had come to being immolated, my eyebrows being the only part of me that met its demise.
My mom picked me up and took me to her house to recover from the shock. “Who’s that?” I pointed to a photo in the back room.
“That was your great aunt, Maribel. Why? She passed away when you were only a baby.”
There was no mistaking it. It was the woman who had helped me escape from my car.
Literature in Small Doses 