{Excerpt of a View}

 …I turn from the passenger window, a blur of wilderness in oceanic hues, the secreted capsule beneath my tongue, gives me impulse to crack it between my teeth and let the contents drain down my throat…my teeth grind, I’m holding onto something that’s no longer mine…I turn to the driver, contemplate his profile, feel my impulse shift to my fingers, a singular twitch, I shift my position until it’s the back of his head that has my attention, enrapt with deeds, clandestine and sinful…The moon, an eclipse of emotionless inquisition, howls at the back of my eyes, hollows of ruin, and I submit to the darkness…I clasp my hands to his eyes, ‘It’s time,’ he takes his hands from the wheel, his weight on the accelerator, to get as much distance from his passenger, he ignores her…words and flesh…she’s a phantoglyph, a memory in horrific figure, an unwinding of mental fitness…but he believes he can out run her, he can secret a portal of escape in the speed and immediacy of a head on collision…she laughs a hallowed tone, and eases back into her seat, as comfortable with his death as she is her own…he sets his sights and tenses, as she lights up and inhales an incense of clove and brimstone clouding the raw salt air…the impact phases her not, leaving him a rotted waste that she tsks at, “foolhardy imbecile,” she vacates the wreckage, standing beside his corpse of bad decisions, she clutches the ill-fitting flesh at the back of his neck, and drags his dead weight from self-destruction, down upon the unforgiving earth, and through her ever advancing steps towards his reckoning…

{Excerpt Of A View} E. A. O'Connell. January 17, 2021.