by Jesse Raub
Shuffled #9

The air was cold as she righted herself in the ditch, sitting up and smearing her hair out of her face and flattening the front of her skirt that had ridden up mid-thigh.  The ditch was dry and thick with crabgrass; if she had landed two feet closer to the road she would have skidded through some gravel first.  The cold air burned all the way down her throat as she let out a huge gasp and pulled in her first breath since the loud snap of the tire blowing.

A fanfare went off in her head, followed by a strobe-light of pain.  Her knees were all busted up, and when she looked down, spots of blood were dotting the front of her white shirt, dripping from her nose.  She wiped her nose and felt a hot flash wipe through her sinuses through her brain.  Possibly broken.

And then things just became. . . silly.  Rushing to make it to a dinner at her father’s house on time.  That was a stupid reason to die.  She had been worried about brown smudge on her duvet cover.  Not anymore!  And even the expired driver’s license in her purse (which was. . . where?) didn’t really seem like a big deal.

She got dizzy, and laid back into the grass.  She let her eyes focus, and unfocus, and focus again at the splatter of stars in the black sky.  They looked like sprinkles on a cupcake.  Forty feet down the ditch, her compact sedan still had one headlight shining out into the field, and a few cows mooed distractedly before moseying back and forth through the beam.

Car-crash Cupcakes.  Chocolate ones with those little white sprinkles on top, she thought as she started to feel a bit sleepy and blood pooled began to form a small puddle by the back of her head.

But I guess I didn’t really crash the car. . . she thought as she started to slip unconscious.  And then the last thing she remembered were the flashing lights of a State Trooper rolling slowly up to the edge of the ditch.

“Success” by Jesse Raub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

“Success” is a short fiction interpretation of the Iggy Pop song of the same name from the album Lust For Life, released through Virgan Records in the year 1977. It is the ninth story written as part of the Shuffled series, in which inspiration is chosen by random computerized algorithms on a well stocked iPod.