take me far enough to say we're gone

classic collision intro ⤵

It happened the split second he stepped on the path. All he scried was the blur of white on top of black just before the collision. Now, Shady Rooster had wrecked a few cars. Got hit by a train, once, in a dream. This didn’t feel like any of that; there was no metallic crunch preceding weird silence. No walls around him. No steering wheel in his hands. This was unstoppable force vs moveable object. This was heavier, showier muscle plowing into a rough-hewn and more sinewy frame. For a split second it knocked his lights out and he saw stars. Green, plastic, noctilucent. He even had a thought as he was listing: I’m gonna cover Lady in ‘em things.

Stuck to the ceiling and the walls. They’d roll down the Robert Edge Parkway onto Main in that alien glow.

Then he hit the graciously soft forest floor and his skeleton was a struck idiophone and leaves crunched ‘n crammed into the hoodie he took from his buddy's house. An umphff forced out of him, then the high keening tapered to quiet in his eardrums and he blinked hard while shooting upright to sit on his ass instead of strewn like a cadaver across the ground.

Searing red gave way to the grey woods, and in front of him, a stranger. What a grand time to be illiterate! Shady’s algae colored eyes made a drunken saccade from the words on his shirt, which he could not begin to make out, to the man’s face. The cut of his jaw and his coloring and his getup, if only because Shady couldn’t read the shirt, hinted military. Hinted cop. Assuredly because Shady was trying more than usual to avoid authority figures, but still.

“Shit fire,” he said overtop hell, then dared look away so he could examine the heels of his hands and his bent legs. Nothing hurt, yet, but he knew it’d take a minute to kick in. On the bright side, nothing looked bent the wrong way, either.

His eyes cut back to the stranger, charily seeking his hands. Would he go for a weapon? Would he recognize his department was looking for someone of Shady’s description, and the woodland around the park was a prime spot for a small town fugitive to lurk around?

Naw — he looked smiley instead. Not an, I gotcha now, kinda grin, but like he was amused at their dizzy mothdance toward Heaven’s light. He said something. An anecdote of some kind, but Shady hadn’t been to school — much less boarding school. He had to guess at the context. And, hey — he’d been whooped on around that seventh-grade stage of life, too. He got it, he guessed.

Just about the time his silence and the set of his jaw and squint of his eyes and glance of his teeth could have meant nothing other than stewing rage, the corner of Shady’s mouth fish-hooked then split into a too-wide grin and he laughed. A single cackle of a ha!

He started picking himself up like he was a Monopoly board flipped off the table and his wits were scattered pieces. Fingers grazed leaves, he swayed hunched a beat, then straightened out his spine and stuck his scraped hand out.