Competition Fourteen Winning Story: The Transfer of Energy Between Two Bodies in Motion by Charles Prelle

Your words glisten in the oncoming headlights. Pop, pop, pop, like bursting balloons. The windscreen erupts, a torrent of glass flooding empty spaces. Tyres squeal all around. I take your hand. Like I used to.

I’m saying it because I miss you, I said to break the silence. A silence you used to fill.

The force of the collision folds the bonnet in upon itself. A swell of metal crashes over us, pulls us under. The air is petrol and burnt rubber. The rear passenger side lurches. Momentum takes us over and in the maelstrom your hand slips from mine. In the vortex I lose you.

I’m sorry, you said. You never saw the car approaching.

For a moment we are weightless. Gravity loosens the binds between us, and I’m reminded of the sea, and how as children we’d take each other’s hand, and dive off the local quay, and I’d swim below the waves to see how deep I could go, and I’d hold my breath, and my lungs would burn almost ready to explode, and I’d absorb the darkness, and the silence, and imagine what it would be like to drown.

I’m sorry.

We come to rest in a contortion of steel near the central reservation. Oil-stained night seeps into each fissure, rising like flood water. Spinning blue lights across an asphalt sky. A thousand shards of glass litter the ground, remnants of your voice escaping from each ruined fragment. All the times you said you loved me, and all the ways you’ve said goodbye.

Charles Prelle is a London based writer of short fiction. His writing has won or placed in various competitions and can be found in Ellipsis Zine, Retreat West, Idle Ink, and Reflex Press among others. 

Find him on Twitter @CharlesPrelle or his website www.cprellewriter.wordpress.com

Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash

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