It offers the sky smoke, dark and thick and ruthless.

All Camelia Byrd can think about as the sound of the sirens roll past — shrill, strange, sharp choirs-voice fading away — is how beautiful it is. Not that she and her daughter almost died. Not that she can still see the collision every time her eyes flutter close, nor that she can still hear the loud horrific sound of it.

No, what she thinks is that it is beautiful.

It’s this thought that makes her suspect that she has been injured somehow, and that she is not thinking clearly.

But how can anything in the world be clear when so much smoke exists.

She catches a smell that is soft and earthen and buttery and it smells to her almost like a before. She breathes in the before but can’t chase down the memory that’s curled within the scent.

She had never known that there was this much smoke in all the world. It’s black as pitch, and it smells like a gas station. The smoke rises, reaching to grasp the sun. Black breaking apart into the yellow light that stretches across the sky.

Beneath the smoke is the car — her car maybe, which has molded itself around the hood of another vehicle. The body of the two are like a hulking geometric flower, crumpled. Metal sheets like petals fall from both of them.

It’s so hot, she thinks.

It is hot; and, summer throws its heat into the new folds and creases of the cars. Heat waves push off from the metal gorges, shuddering the air.

Camelia rises.

She rises from the side of the street where she has sat for what she believes might’ve been a long time. Her daughter, six years old and scared, rises with her.

 Her daughter has not said a word since their car became that metal flower, smoking and crumpled, in front of them. As they stand, her daughter slips her small smooth hand firmly into her own.

Camelia squeezes the small hand a little too hard. The little hand within her own shivers for but a moment. From her daughter’s lips, no words spill.

Police, Camelia thinks.

Her legs are unsteady as she walks closer to the car. The sirens she heard earlier were in the distance. They are not yet here. Around them, on both sides of the street, are fields and fields of tall yellow stalks, tightly standing. In front of her, the rest of the road is obscured by a group of bright peach trees, pink and blossoming. She looks as far as the sharp curve in the road will let her, and finds the road empty.

It is still only them.

The driver of the other car has not yet climbed out; has not yet gotten the chance to see the beautiful smoke that peels into the air across the fields of tall yellow-green wheatgrass. A gust of hot air billows around her, blowing in from somewhere unknown. As the summer air blows, the wheat grass tickles the patches of Camelia’s exposed skin, little scratches at her arms and the places where her jeans had been worn away at the moments where Camelia and the ground had met one another and embraced.

Camelia does not push as it scratches at her, sharp honeycomb tips making her itch. Camelia sways with the wind, legs weak, a caricature scarecrow in the field that has scared no one.

Camelia thinks about sitting back down on the ground at the side of the road, and laying there for a while beneath the shade of the large peach trees a few feet into the field of glistening wheatgrass. The peach trees beckon, shivering with the tremor of heavy flower laden limbs.

“Mama,” Camelia thinks she hears her daughter say with a sharp little tug on Camelia’s hand.

As her daughter pulls on her hand, Camelia knows something deep within the meager threadbare muscle fibers of her arm has been damaged –something profound has been loosed or torn or crushed. Pain punches its way to the front of her thoughts for a moment, and her shoulder feels like it’s being torn from the socket.

 But, the pain triggers something in Camelia’s throat as her jaw clenches tight. The pain has struck a match in the corners of Camelia’s eyes, and her pupils dart from the flame.

Her daughter had been in the metal flower too, the flames tell her.

Now Camelia looks her daughter over hard, her sight scatters over the little girl’s chestnut colored skin — she checks for bruises and cuts. She checks for the places where the girl too has been torn and her bones pressed like rare flowers into the page of a book. She finds nothing, not a blemish on that smooth little face, and she is relieved.

There is panic rising in Camelia, deep in her tummy, like butterflies gone feral. This time she can follow the before. The feeling reminds her, briefly, of how it felt to kiss her first grade crush on the schoolyard of her elementary school in the foggy morning before the bell rang to let them inside. She remembers her crush’s name, David Turner, and how many years later he had given her 50 dollars for a quiet moment behind the grocers when she’d been short on cash.

Her daughter pulls her arm again, harder than the first time. The pain crushes her memories into dandelion seed, and they blow away with the building wind — gone.

“Mama,” her daughter says.

 It sounds like a plea.

Before the pain in her arm cools and dulls itself into the background of her mind, Camelia wonders if she might be in shock. She shakes her head, trying to answer her own question. She has survived worse things, she reminds herself. She looks to where her daughter’s other arm is raised, outstretched, the spirit of accusation keeping the limb floating in the air.

 Her daughter is pointing at where the cars lay. There’s a glimmer of movement behind the kaleidoscope cracks in the window of the other vehicle.

Camelia looks through the cracked window, cupping her free hand over her brow to block out the sun. Still sitting in his seat, the driver of the second car struggles against his seatbelt. White fabric is strewn everywhere from the airbag cushion that cocoons him.

The man looks up and stares at Camelia, and for a moment he stops struggling. He tries to speak but no words can strangle their way out of his throat. The seatbelt seems constrictive and snakelike, a grey strip lashed around the man. Camelia thinks the belt looks like it may rear up at any time and wrap itself around her or her daughter next. She takes a step back in fear. The man tries to speak again, but this time he succeeds.

“You need to cut it off of me.”

Camelia stands there and stares. The man’s voice is rough and strained. She wonders if it always sounds like this, or if it is the smoke that has coursened it, added grit where before there was none. The man in the car is wearing a suit, but his once-pressed collared shirt is split open into accordion threads and there is no tie. His, unlike hers, was an expensive car. Now it is part of the same complicated metallic arrangement as her own.

“There’s a tool in the glovebox. I can’t reach it,” the man says, pointing to nothing Camelia can see.

Camelia lets go of her daughter’s hand, the sudden absence stinging, and walks around the crumpled twist of the cars. Her daughter does not follow.

Camelia pulls at the passenger’s side door of the man’s car with the hand that destroys her with every movement. It is lodged shut, and the handle is hot against the palm of her hand. Camelia plants her feet, and pulls at the handle with both hands.

She drowns in the pain that screams from her shoulder. The fire behind her eyes is snuffed, her vision filled instead with haze the color of crushed snow. The door grinds open, the bottom of it scraping on the asphalt of the road. She pulls the door all the way open. The inside of the car smells of wet sweat and the caramel char of burnt sugar.

Camelia opens the glovebox. It plops open, and the contents fall out onto the seat. There, amongst the papers and the napkins and the broken shards of a bottle of rum, is a small plastic tool. The blade is nestled inside a small hook. It is a vivid almost neon orange. Camelia considers the use of placing a tool for cutting seatbelts where one could not possibly reach it in the event that one might actually need to cut one’s seatbelt.

“Cut it off of me,” the trapped man says.

She does her best to avoid letting the wet shards of glass on the floor puncture the bottom of her bare feet. She pushes a large jagged half cylinder of a bottle across the wet and warm rubber of the floor mat. She climbs onto the seat and maneuvers the guillotine metal teeth of the small tool against the man’s seatbelt. She pulls and the tool cuts and the man is free to fall forward against his wheel — and he does. The wheel is not aggrieved. It releases a long blaring honk.

She nudges the man to the side with her good arm. He slumps over and struggles to lift himself from the awkward position. She looks down at him, looks at the struggling man and finally sees the mangling of bone and metal. The man will not walk from his car, she understands now.

The man, eyes closed, breathes very deeply and very fast for a while as if stealing life back between his ribcage. Camelia keeps her eyes on the shredded flesh beneath the steering wheel. There is scarlet there, as bright as the pink of the peach blossoms and as black as the smoke above them.

“Your legs,” she says.

“There’s a town not too far back,” the man says.

“Are you in pain?”

“No,” he says, and they are all the worse for hearing the word said aloud.

“Have you seen it?” Camelia asks. She points down at the man’s shattered limbs. She knows the man is telling the truth about not feeling the pain of his injuries, because there was no way he would not be screaming bloody murder if he were. His bones swam in a lake of blood and grizzled flesh in the cavities of his back.

“Is it bad?” the man asks.

“You should see it,” she says.

“I guess it’s bad then.”

“Do you live back there?”

“In that place?”

“No.”

“We will tell the Sirens to come,” Camelia says.

The man braces an arm against the open driver’s side door. His fingers climb up the frame to the top, and with his other hand he holds fast to the wheel of the car. When his fingers coast the top of the door frame he pulls, grunting as he does, his way into a seated position. Camelia is glad to not be made witness to the sight of his bones so startling and white from where they sat within his meat. His chest heaves and Camelia reaches her good hand to lay it on his chest above his heart. She does not know what she thinks this will do, but she is pleased when the man’s breathing slows. Steadies.

She can see her daughter through the cracked driver’s side window, watching them both with a serene expression of nothing at all.

“Both of you are hurt really bad, aren’t you?” the man says. He gestures at her daughter.

“She’s fine,” Camelia insists, and she takes her hand back from the man’s chest. Her hand is slick with his sweat.

“You came out of nowhere,” he says. His eyes are like a fogged bathroom mirror now, grey and wet. He licks his chapped lips.

Camelia does not respond. She gets out of the car. She moves around to where her daughter stands and offers her daughter her good hand.

“I—” he starts to say, and then he stops. His hand tightens around the wheel.

Camelia does not know what he was going to say. She only knows that he gasps for air, chapped lips making a wide ‘O’ as he chomps at empty space in the haze filled car in an attempt to get oxygen into his lungs. She only knows that she reaches through the tearing pain to cover her daughter’s eyes with her bad hand. Her daughter does not react, respects the authority of her ruined hand blocking her view.

She takes some steps back and her daughter steps with her, a matching pair.

She turns around to listen for the sirens that she can no longer hear. The world is empty of sound except the wetness of the man’s breathing and the enraged hiss of mechanical parts. She ignores these sounds and listens, listens so that she can find them and then the Sirens can sing their way to this road. The Sirens can uproot the metal flower of cars and man and the earth itself. She hears what sounds like their song coming from across the field of copper white grass.

“We’re going to find the Sirens,” she tells her daughter.

“They can help. But we have to listen for them,” Camelia says.

Her daughter does not give a response but to nod; her eyelids fluttering against Camelia’s hand.

They walk forward into the field and are embraced by it. They walk away from the heavy ink black cloud and the smell of hot metal. They walk together towards the wail of help Camelia still believes she can hear.

+++

Richardo Khan Brown-Whitt is Jamaican-American multidisciplinary artist and writer whose work is dedicated to the pockets of liminal spaces under and between unearthed memory. R.K.B. graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a B.A. in English Writing and a B.A. in Political Science. They went on to attend and graduate from Wake Forest University School of Law to obtain their J.D. Today, they operate a boutique law firm, and create art through Marrowdrift Studios, a studio they created.