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A Brief Interaction

by Nicholas Olson

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about

Short story about an interaction between a car and a bicycle.

3.5x5" book with illustrations available for purchase here: ballsofrice.bandcamp.com/merch

lyrics

You are lying on the street in cardiac arrest. I am obliged to inform your unconscious, breathless body of my newly acquired First Aid training. This, for some reason, is supposed to reassure you, as if my knowledge to enter three digits on a phone grabbed out of a bystander's pocket changes the fact that your heart has ceased. All I can do is Check, Call, Care, but according to the brawny male firefighters who taught my First Aid course, this should be reassuring.
I kneel over your motionless frame which lays in a pothole; the city’s inept road infrastructure cupping your battered body. I lose my head and forget which First Aid acronym to follow in this situation. The ABCs or R.I.C.E. or SAID or MSS or H1N5 or INAC. Blood pooling on the road, I recall a show on public radio that spoke to the misconception of the effectiveness of CPR. When doctors are confident that CPR will not save a life, they will often fake it. Slow Code they called it. Because if your family and friends were here, where I am, over your body, they could not understand a paramedic who would stand by idly and let their family member die. I consider this while looking at my car, smashed windshield and crashed into the ditch, and your bicycle a knotted clump on the sidewalk.
“Does anyone know CPR?” someone shouts from the side of the street. I hover over your body like an apparition and realize that I am someone who knows CPR. I brush your jet-black hair from your forehead and tell you it will be alright. I lean close to your face to check your respiration. You are not breathing. I am breathing fast enough for the both of us. I forget which step is first. Do I tend to your head, partially crushed, or do I do CPR? I forget to assess the situation for danger, I forget to call someone for help. I begin pressing on your chest. My pale arms are locked at the elbows and bounce up and down on your sternum. I break your ribs.
I rest two fingers on an amateur eagle tattoo on the inside of your wrist, but remember that checking for a pulse is nearly useless. I try to think of a sensitive way to say that this was your fault——riding your bicycle through a crosswalk——so that if you survive I can make an appearance at the hospital and simultaneously express my guilt and show you that nothing will stop a moving car full of gas lobbied-for by the government. I am here, tending to your wounds——I cannot be held liable. Though I was one of the two parts of this collision, it is not my fault. It is as if you were used to riding from house to house on the reserve and didn’t adapt to the cars of the city. Tending to you is not my responsibility, it is that of the professionals. You blew through a crosswalk on what was, in all likelihood, a stolen bike. You wore no helmet.
Someone who seems to know you runs from across the street. He wears a long black braid under a camouflage hat and embroidered jacket. He looks at me with dark angry eyes, void of reality, and says,
“You killed him. You killed my nephew. I was the best aunt he ever had.” He, claiming to be a she, puts up his fists and shows his teeth, dancing in the middle of the road. I back away from you. Your supposed-aunt tells me to get the fuck out of here, and she kneels by your body.
The police arrive. They reroute traffic and talk with your aunt, seemingly knowing her by name. Your aunt hobbles back and forth in the closed street as if she had been hit by a car at some point in her life. She shouts at no one in particular. Maybe at me, maybe at herself.
The paramedics arrive. They are trained in emergency so they do what I cannot, and begin proper CPR. They gather around you and give you what you need to survive with no worry as to what will happen to you tomorrow. Bystanders loiter on the corner and crane their necks to see the damage. Awareness will change how these onlookers drive, how they bike, how they walk, and we’ll all be safer for this event. The paramedics lay plastic over your face and gauze on your head. They pound your chest and fill your lungs with their air. They splint your shattered leg and lift you onto a plank. They slide you into the back of their truck. You are out of my hands, no longer my worry. The system will take care of you as it was designed to do.
The police ask me questions standing next to their cruiser. It was both your fault and my fault, they say. They don’t mention the benefits of shared and increased knowledge of cars and bicycles and how the two interact; it was just an accident. Our brief, traumatic, passing interaction will teach me of the sanctity of life, and for some period of time, I will be a changed person.
The police cruiser carts your aunt away. The ambulance carts you away. Their sirens scream, their lights flash. The tow truck driver throws your bicycle into the back of my car and drags the duo in the direction of the junk yard.
We will both be better people because of this.

credits


Music: Matthew Meehan (sonhowler.bandcamp.com)
Narration: Kristina Hedlund
Written by: Nicholas Olson
Artwork: Alex Murray (atmmurray[at]gmail.com)

A Brief Interaction originally appeared in SWG’s Spring magazine. It is based on an essay entitled Slow Code Colonialism first published in Transition Magazine and available to read on BallsOfRice.com

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Balls of Rice Saskatchewan

Stories and poems written mostly on Treaty 4, Treaty 6, and Lekwungen Territory.

See BallsOfRice.com for more writing.

Photo: Courtney Boe

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