Flash Fiction 3rd Place: Passing by Chris Milner

The black car turns out of the side road, a hundred yards away, right into your path, just after you’ve pulled out to pass the articulated wagon that’s been slowing you down for miles, and there’s no space for you to pull across with the massive tyres of the wagon on your left and the murderous stone wall on your right, while her words still ring in your ears and the adrenaline still courses unchecked through every inch and corner of your body and the blood thump-thumps through your system, with her accusations rebounding around your head in an emotional torrent before her summary conclusion and dismissal, and your guilt aching, and your pleading scorned, and your regret deeply cutting through you and gripping the wheel, and the tumbling tears blinding you to the road’s dangers, and the horror now on your face, no, not on your face, on the face of the woman in the black car suddenly grasping the situation, with her eyes wide and her mouth moving to spit out her prayers and her obscenities, like the orders from Moorland and his opinions about your reports and the delays, his insults and demands, and you feel again the deep fatigue which has been overwhelming you, and you wonder why you didn’t face up to it, to him, why you never grasped that opportunity and told them where to stuff their bloody project and why you ignored what you knew it was doing to you, before she looks back to shout at the child you now notice in the rear, tightly strapped into a booster seat, watching you hurtle towards them, your brakes ineffectually squealing and smoking but far too late, hopelessly late, as you and the woman and the child well know, with the momentum of the vehicle unstoppable at this distance, and the gap ever closing and the tyres sliding on the damp road and the inevitable happening like you remember it happening on that day when you were caught behind the chemistry lab, and the relationship and the shame was exposed and the whole school knowing and the torment beginning, and there being no hiding, and everyone laughing every day, week after week, for months, and a universe and an eternity away from the sweet warmth, the comfort and raw pleasure you’d found on that first day at nursery when your mother had passed you to Mrs Armitage and walked out without a backward glance, and Mrs Armitage had smiled and you’d felt that sudden rush of love, and you’d thrown your arms around her and kissed her cheek and realised for the first time that not everyone is cold and brittle and unforgiving, that not all women smell of Martini and wee, that not all women leave you to put yourself to bed, that not all women shriek and cry incessantly like you can see the woman in the black car doing as it becomes the last thing you ever see.