BEEP-BEEP-BEEP
His car has an alarm that sounds whenever he exceeds 70mph. It’s repetitive, like the beat at the rave where they first met, two idiots flailing in a field, convinced they’d be young forever. Now it rises above the engine’s rev as he accelerates past one vehicle, then another, desperate to reach her.
The drive to the hospital will take around an hour. The thought occurs, as he passes a service station’s cartoon coffee cup, that these are the last moments of this part of his life. Dappled sunlight illuminates the dashboard.
“Collapsed at work,” the message had said.
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP
Her alarm is always set for 5.30am, jolting him loose from his dreams. He usually tries to sleep in for another thirty minutes or so, hands on the warmth where her body has been. She had stayed up late to finish her sales presentation, and he wonders now if that quick goodnight kiss will become their final instance of conscious contact.
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP
Accelerated pips on a heart monitor. A result, her chart will show, of impaired ventricular function.
His phone, mercifully, is on mute in the pocket of the jacket flung onto the backseat. Any attempt to update him or to reach out for information – his mother, her sisters – will have to wait until he is parked and motionless. He is between points, alone with his thoughts of her.
This is a special kind of magical thinking, he realises, to keep the horror at bay until someone in a hospital coat confirms it.
Still, he eases off the accelerator and sits back in the silence.
Edward Barnfield is a writer and researcher living in the Middle East. His stories have appeared in Triangulation, Third Flatiron, Strands, Galley Beggar Press, The Molotov Cocktail, Tenebrous Press, Leicester Writes, Strands Publishers, Cranked Anvil, and Shooter Literary, among others. He’s on X at @edbarnfield.
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