Accidents and Coincidence

The morning sun rose over the trees, shimmering against the morning dew on the leaves. Sasha was upside down in her blue Jetta and soaring through the air, time tending to crawl in these sorts of situations. There had been a deer in the road and her coffee was still too hot to drink — panicking and half-awake, she’d jerked the car to the right. Now she was airborne and flipping.

Wonder if I’ll make it to work on time, Sasha thought, followed by an intense urge to sip her coffee. The Jetta completed its rotation and time resumed its regular pace. There was a hellish crunch of metal, and a cacophonous grinding of car and asphalt. Sasha’s forehead smacked the steering wheel and a concussive blast exploded in her face. Then everything went black.

When she woke, the airbag was already deflated, and her nose screamed in agony. Her heart climbed up her throat as she assessed the situation, and her thoughts came rambling from her mouth.

“Broken,” she said checking her nose with shaking hands, “but alive. Definitely gonna be late. Not a good day to be late. How long have I been out?”

She was sitting upright and cocked forty-five degrees, her car smoking and sputtering in the ditch. The passenger-side roof of the Jetta had completely caved in, and the windows of the car had blown out entirely. Sasha looked through the spiderwebs of her windshield to see the deer still on the road, a doe by her hazy estimation. Gratefully, her mug still sat in its cupholder.

She unbuckled and got out of the car, shouldering the door to get it open. Her head thrummed like a tuning fork, but she walked from the ditch and sat on the side of the road, coffee in hand. It was still a bit too hot to drink.

“Possible concussion. Stay awake, call 911,” she said, grabbing her phone from her pocket. “Gotta call Heather first. Of all the fucking days.”

It was pre-test day at the refinery, a culmination of months of work, maintenance, and upgrades on her part. The tests started at 0700, and she wanted to be there when they brought the rig back online. Her phone read 0720. Sasha had been out much longer than she’d initially thought.

Her boss picked up on the second ring. Sasha heard sirens and alarms in the background.

“Oh, thank God,” Heather said, “are you alright?”

“Umm, I’m a little banged up, but I’m okay. What’s going on? What are those sirens?”

“Don’t know much yet,” Heather said, “but we think it was a spark in the DHT. LeVar and Gomez were caught in the blast. You chose a good day to be late — I thought you’d been in the crawlspace.”

Sasha was stunned into silence, her head spinning in confusion. She caught a glance of the doe, who seemed to be looking right at her.

“Listen, I’ve got to finish emergency protocols and…” Heather said, her voice choking and trailing off. “And make a few terrible phone calls. Take the day off — there’ll be plenty of work here tomorrow, and you really don’t want to see this. I’m glad you’re okay.”

Before Heather hung up the phone, Sasha heard people shouting and the howl of the evacuation alarm. She sat on the side of the road in shock, the sun peeking through the conifers and warming her face. Other than her head and nose, she was seemingly otherwise unharmed.

She turned to look back down the road, but the doe was gone. The wind blew through the alley of trees, the leaves dancing in the crystalline light. Sasha took a sip of her coffee. It was the perfect temperature.