The Wicked Sound of Shattered Glass
Fiction. When an Editor-in-Chief makes a stop to review her journalist's work, she’s torn about giving critical feedback on a cold case. Sometimes, a writer has to get lost to spin a compelling tale.
You’d think that amidst those trees, it would have been easier to tell her. Sitting on the trunk of my car as the sun swept across the horizon, I could have emailed: “You don’t have enough here. This story isn’t ready.”
With half my face lit by sunset, and the other half in the shadow of the rest stop, I felt split inside. Our journal had remained reputable over the years, but interest was drying up, and we needed something… explosive. As Editor-in-Chief, I had thrown open my office doors and told my team to “make unexpected choices,” to “treat every moment like it’s your last chance,” to “cut deep.”
And in that room of journalists, Farah had heard me. Her mind had spun on all gears and driven her to a local council member who was dripping secrets by the bucket. More loose strings than any public figure could weave back into place. So many that Farah made a police report request for an old case—A missing child, a dead woman, a stolen car, and a dismissed charge. She had found significant new evidence, she told them, and even if a retrial wasn’t possible, she needed to get the truth out. Then, someone in the precinct must have decided to give an old friend a warning. When Farah went knocking that week to ask more questions, the council member’s unlocked door drifted open, and she nudged it the rest of the way.
He was gone.
When she sat down to write her story, she wrote so intimately that I could feel sweat forming on my face as I read the first draft. Farah had pieces of the puzzle that the public didn’t. The world saw a man fleeing for his life, but she saw the shards of bone in the newly dug-up garden cordoned off with police tape. The world kept asking why she had scared this man away, but only because they hadn’t seen the sealed photos from the crash, the images of slicing wounds that flared out like a kaleidoscopic pattern.
Farah’s writing was immaculate. With my eight years as Editor-in-Chief, I wouldn’t flinch to call it the best prose I’d read in my tenure. But the actual narrative was falling apart in my hands. The evidence was glaringly circumstantial, and her story didn’t read as the closed door on a devastating chapter. Just another self-defense narrative from one of the most hated journalists of the hour. I couldn’t leave her to the wolves like that.
Stylus in hand, I set to work on marking up her latest draft. I drew a square around her opening paragraph and struck a line through it. In the margins, I added, “Make this the reader’s story before making it yours.” In the next paragraph, a description of the garden foreshadowed what the police would eventually find there. I etched a circle around that paragraph and included a small symbol: an arrow pointing down onto a line, my shorthand for “reveal it now.”
I scrolled down one page, and a photo of the council member sat alongside the text. A tall face, a sharp smile, and ghostly skin stood starkly against deep black hair, styled almost boyishly. Richard Preyther.
I held his photo up, and underneath me, I felt something shift. I chalked it up to the suspension and hopped down from the trunk, turned around, dropped my tablet, and froze.
The sky was different. The shadows that had struck down my middle now stretched in a different direction. The parking lot, once bustling, sat quietly, and I could barely see any cars speeding past the rest stop on the highway. The rest stop complex looked smaller, with no neon signs plastered across it, and I couldn’t spot anyone in my line of sight. My black coupe that I’d just jumped down from was now a square and fading brown sedan. And there was a man leaning against it, holding a gun, wearing a plastic cartoon mask with a painfully wide smile plastered across.
We stood there for a moment, the wind blowing past each of us until he stood up straight and tipped his gun toward the car. He tapped the driver’s side window twice and stepped back, opening his arms like an invitation before lifting the gun to me again and receding further. I slowly raised my hands, and with each step I took toward him, he stepped around the car in turn.
As I passed the rear driver’s side door, I heard a tiny moan come from my right. I turned, and in the back was a baby, strapped into a seat and lightly flailing in my direction. The shock from that was barely felt by the time my eyes focused on the window and I saw my reflection. Whoever was in the glass was another woman in every way. Long red hair draping past her shoulders, and the soft features of a teenager. She was so young, and we were both shaking.
A thud, thud of his gun on the roof brought me back, and I quickly opened the door and dropped into the driver’s seat. He slipped into the car, gun still pointed at me, and his voice burst out, authoritative and unquestionable.
“Get back on the highway.”
Something trickled through my mind but disappeared too quickly. I scanned around the dashboard, then looked up to the visor and saw the keys dangling above me. When I brought them down, I could hear the baby coo in the backseat. Gun still aimed my way with his right hand, he turned in his seat to look back at the baby and slid the plastic mask off with his left, his eyes drilling into the child.
“Too bad,” he breathed.
Tall. Sharp. Ghostly. What a still image couldn’t capture was how wickedly wide Richard’s eyes were. My hand froze with the keys in the ignition and he twisted back to look at me. In the same low, breathy voice he said, “Let’s go.”
My head felt like I’d tumbled down a hill. The car was starting to spin around me. I twisted my wrist, stepped lightly on the gas, and we began to drift forward. He sat blankly as the car glided.
A small pothole made us bounce, and we heard something bang in the car. He looked down to the glove compartment and pressed the latch. It opened with a clatter as a chef’s knife bounced down toward him.
He let out a single laugh, just an escaping breath that pitched him slightly forward. And then another tumbled out, creakier. Two, then three louder laughs lurched forward, his eyes squinting, his neck craning as he grabbed his stomach. Richard’s shoulders trembled as he cackled loudly, the bark becoming dark, and deep, and vicious. The baby began to cry behind us, and I watched as Richard’s pointer finger drifted from the trigger to the grip as the laughter took him over. Turning my head back, I watched the baby bawl, then watched Richard howl uncontrollably over the knife in the glove compartment.
The rest stop complex rolled up near the right of us, and I looked at the wide glass entryway that revealed the empty innards of the building. My vision was starting to spin again. Then, in my head, I heard the sound of wood being torn open.
Make unexpected choices.
Something wicked roared my own words in my head.
I looked back at the baby. Buckled in.
I whipped the steering wheel hard to the right. With that motion, I threw my body toward Richard. One hand on the gun, the other on the knife. Foot pressed steeply into the gas pedal. By the time he looked up at me, the cacophony had begun. Glass shattering. Metal bending, screeching. The sound was like rain as the shards spilled down on us. The car pitched up, and we levitated for a moment. And he looked into my eyes. Then Richard Preyther morphed from confusion to rage.
Before the car landed, I pulled my right hand away from Richard. In it was the gun, and the front three car windows had shattered. I flicked it towards the windshield as glass continued to splatter down around us. The knife was in my left hand. The blade had faced me, and I’d reached past it to the handle, twisting it to right it my way. Richard reacted instinctively, grabbing at the knife and placing his palm around the only exposed surface. He wrapped his fingers around the blade and I yanked back. Red streaks came with me, flying from his hand, his mouth forming the first sounds of a scream.
The car landed, making my foot slip and causing me to stomp down on the brake. His head slammed into the dashboard, mine into the steering wheel. And the knife launched from my hand and across the open space, sliding over the linoleum floor.
The world tinged black for a moment. I heard a door open. I heard crying as my vision ebbed. I could feel my scalp peeling open as warm liquid dripped down my face.
Another roar.
Treat every moment like it’s your last chance.
My eyes shot open, and with soreness spreading like a network across my body, I threw open the car door. Almost every inch of me was covered in glass, the tiny slices stinging as I stepped out into the open space and focused my vision. Turning back momentarily, the baby flailed but looked untouched by the shards. Richard had his right hand clutched under his armpit and was sliding through the glass across the room. Several yards ahead, the knife lay on the floor. Further still, near the back wall was the gun. He looked at me, fire in his eyes, blood splattered across his shirt. And he ran.
I took after him, barely able to navigate through the sprawling ocean of broken glass that covered the room. I moved around the metal frames sprawled about. He was closer to the knife. And I was still swimming through the shards. I felt the adrenaline pumping in my ears. Each lift of my legs became more laborious. I wiped the still-flowing blood from my eyes and pressed forward as the edges of my vision began to blacken again.
That’s when Richard made a choice. He stepped right past the knife, heading for the gun further beyond it. I pressed into the ground and suddenly realized that bits of glass were still lodged in my arms.
He tumbled over somewhere between the knife and the gun. I grabbed the handle as I passed and launched myself toward him. He had barely rolled over by the time I’d straddled him. Clutched the handle of the knife in both hands above my head, blade down.
There was no roar that time. Just a chant, muddied like it was being spoken underwater. It turned the edges of my vision from black to red. The room kept spinning. I could see lines all across his face, his body, that shimmered green and blue and orange. And twisted, just like a kaleidoscope. As the chants got louder, as they filled every nook of the room, I felt a scream bubbling up from inside me, taking control of every neuron in my body.
Cut deep. Cut deep. Cut deep.