Triangulation

The overheated asphalt pulls away from the grooved rubber of my underside of my shoes, its inexplicable mass that once forced me unto itself has loosened its grip. The immediate space around me is propagated with crude, angular steel and concrete, their structural integrity diminished and long forgotten.

It's often said that people see things in slow motion; something in the brain clicks, malfunctions or shifts momentarily, resulting in heightened awareness, quicker reflexes and an incredible euphoria. Jordan would see the final minutes of a close ball game in creep past him, he could sense the anxiety in their sweat, their fear in their eyes. Reality replaced with something else.

Dust replaces every conceivable inch of bright colors and reflective surfacing with its blanket of dull, muted silence. My lips, a second before lightly wetted and a bit chapped, are now a fleshy mass of muddled dirt, packed tightly and absorbing all precipitation exhausted from my mouth. My tongue finds its way out, attempting in vain to resuscitate them.

I continue to float, shoved aside by forces unseen. My brain works. I am acutely aware of this fact; my mind is alert, processing the scene around me. It tell me the car about forty feet to my left is, in fact, forty feet to my left, and that it shouldn’t be laying—windows shattered, engine steaming—on its side. It tells me that I shouldn’t be weightless, and the scattered, torn limbs shouldn’t be laying forlornly in the streets and sidewalks.

My arc is changing. Things—light, breath, instincts—accelerate into a rapid fire of thought and illogic. My brain is aching, screaming, urging me that the situation, the flying weightlessness, is not only wrong in its occurrence, but threatening to my survival. I continue to fall, twisting through grime and heat. My instinct, my entire being, pleads for me to brace, cover myself for the imminent collision of concrete and muscle, asphalt and teeth.