Crashing

"This time," she breathes in through her nose and exhales out her mouth, "let's make it seem a little more realistic." Pulling up a thread-bare hoodie just above the navel, she points to two vertical gashes. Infected and still bleeding puss, they watch as she covers up the battle scars and takes a look through the dust caked over the windshield.

"Shit," Tweedle-dee says, itching his crotch before ducking behind the passenger's seat. Two little kids are wandering down the street, one skipping over a neon-purple jump rope and the other sucking on a popsicle while attempting to balance on a rusted scooter.

"Sometimes I forget how the people here really live," says Tweedle-dum. "It's nice to imagine that once they close the doors and shut the curtains that they just stop existing."

"Just imagine them rotting," she smiles and turns the keys, sex dice and a rubber frog dangling between her fingers. The engine groans as if in pain, headlights in the waning rays of the dying sun casting over the children's suddenly surprised faces.

They saw the images of the mangled bodies, barely concealed by a single white sheet every night on the news. The entire playground whispered of how children were getting mauled in broad daylight by a large car, perhaps a truck; always when the adults averted their gaze.

Popsicle mouths what appears to be the word "fuck" before he drops his scooter and takes off, leaving Jump-rope in the dust. "Just wait until their heads spin. That's my favorite part..."

The hood collides with Jump-rope's back, cracking her spine as she flies and collects in a pile of gravel, blood and dust. Before she can cry out, wheels roll over her stomach, crushing her ribs and causing her intestines to erode from the gushing wounds. Stray shards of metal blur through the window in a loud crash and impale Tweedle-dum in the eye, enough to burst through the retina and enter the skull, but not enough to sever the optic nerve. Screaming at the sight of his own nerves, dangling around spurts of blood, he faints before she even closes in on Popsicle.

He hits the hood and flies up in the air, before crashing into the windshield, face-first. Eyes still alive and wide in horror blink at her, before smashing into the glass. The glass stretches with his face, the perfect death mask before it gives way to his entire head, which is now nothing more than ribbons of flesh and broken bones. Brains cake her lap, as she reels at the sight of the shards stuck in her legs and hands.

She turns to face the still form of Tweedle-dum, and leaning over his still body she knows he isn't breathing. A shard of glass from the re-view mirror had found his stomach in the crash and now he was relieving himself on the carpet floor. Congratulating him on being brave enough to sit in front, she turns to face Tweedle-dee and smiles through the gravel stuck in her teeth. Upside down, his right arm is twisted at an impossible angle, only  held in place by a few cords of muscle and skin. Half of his face is staring straight at her... The other half is staring up at the gaping hole where it used to be, amongst the shards of stray metal that had seemed to miss her and Tweedle-dum and pierce him... Everywhere.

"Well," she says to the open wounds and what was left of their paling faces, upturned in pain to the purple sky. And really there was nothing left to say. A sharp breath escapes the glass between her open lips as she chokes... gargles on phlegm and blood and then stills.