Written by Francois Bereaud
Content Warning: Brief mention of racially motivated gun violence, brief mention of traumatic birth, accident.
Crack! Warren’s head hit the windshield and pain shot down his spinal cord. Worse than when
he’d had a head-on with the Michigan fullback. All-American, what was his name? He felt the
left side of his behemoth snowplow lift, then roll. The all-white world turned black.
2 hours before
Visibility was nil and Warren’s bad knee throbbed. His city was in full white-out
condition and here he was at four am maneuvering his eight ton vehicle by memory and the small
map on his cell phone. He called his boss.
“Yeah.”
“It’s been twelve hours, nothin’s lettin’ up. What am I doing out here?”
“I told you. NFL playoff game tomorrow. That’s like ten million dollars of economic impact. We need you.”
“You call Leonard?”
“Covid.”
“I thought that was Arnold.”
“Both.”
Motherfuckers. They probably got a positive test somewhere and sent the same picture to the
boss.
“Hang in there. Gassed up?”
“An hour ago.”
“Good. Bring her back at seven, Rogers will take over. We gotta stay ahead of this.”
Warren hung up. He saw Monica’s last text, sent at two am. I gotta get some sleep. Be safe!!! Luv U.
He knew she worried and how tired she was, taking on extra shifts at the clinic now that he cut
back to focus on his classes. Fuck. He had an online exam in six hours. Did he really want to be
a paralegal this bad? He shook the thermos of coffee she’d made him. Empty.
He’d loved football in the snow. He felt stronger somehow, never cold, even bare-armed. He’d
drop a guy and see his imprint, outlined like a body at a crime scene.
The day junior year he blew out his knee was bone dry. Freak twist. All gone. His playing career,
Big Ten scholarship, dreams of more. Then a week later Monica told him. Pregnant. She knew
they weren’t ready and she was pro-choice, but it wasn’t an option for her. What could he say?
“Shoulda worn a jimmy,” his father, the deacon, said. A jimmy? He stopped going home.
But somehow they’d made it. A nursing degree for her and a secure city job for him. And their
Alicia, now a beautiful thirteen-year-old.
Waves of red-hot icy needles scorched his body. He opened his eyes. The windshield iced and
cracked with a red mosaic pattern that had to be his blood. The light told him it was day. The
steering column pushed into his abdomen, his legs trapped against his seat, and his right arm bent
at a grotesque angle. His whole body shivered. Where was his phone? He raised his left arm to
push at the door, the pain brought bile to his throat. There was no strength. Was he really going
out like this?
He’d cheated death more than once, in fact, it’d been once a decade. When he’d come out of the
womb, he wasn’t breathing, the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, only to draw breath
when a nurse held him under cold water. Then the weird infection he’d gotten as a twelve year
old kid when he cut his knee, the ER doc said some of those were fatal if the fluid wasn’t drained
in time. The time at twenty he’d jumped from the second story when his roommate had set the
kitchen ablaze, suffering only a mild ankle sprain. And last year when he’d forgotten to stop at
the store on the way home, the very same supermarket where a white supremacist was gunning
down folks with his skin color. After he and Monica had cried and raged and cried some more,
with no more tears to give, she’d teased him that maybe he was a cat, nine lives and all.
But now this. A snowplow guy stuck half upside down somewhere in the snow. Maybe his luck
was over. He tried to visualize the map on his lost phone. His brain didn’t seem to work. In
frustration he kicked, both legs at once. He passed out from the pain.
3 hours later
The anti-septic smell and the steady whoosh of a breathing tube could only mean one thing: he
was in the hospital. But how? The pain was duller now, the sharp edges shaved down. He
wondered if he could open his eyes and if he wanted to do so. Maybe he’d died and this was
some sick joke. After you die, you go to the hospital. Then a smell. Warm, faintly citrus. And a
touch on his cheek. He opened his eyes slowly. Monica. Always Monica. His mouth formed a
circle and he drew breath around the tube. He felt her fingers on his mouth as he tried to speak.
“Shh, don’t talk. You have a breathing tube. It’s for your collapsed lung, but it’s temporary.”
Collapsed lung? She pulled from him and stood. “I’ll be right back.”
She returned with his other love. Alicia at thirteen was as tall as her mom, gangly, all knees and
elbows even in baggy pajama bottoms and her favorite pink sweatshirt from his not quite alma
mater. She rushed to Warren and put her face softly on his. He could feel wetness on her cheeks
and tears rose in his chest.
“None of that you two, we’re here to celebrate. Daddy’s gonna be okay,” Monica said.
Alicia pulled back and wiped her face.
Warren smiled back and winced at the pain in his cheeks. He looked at Monica. Am I really
gonna be okay?
She looked at their daughter. “Tell him.”
Alicia smiled huge and pulled out her cell phone, an iPhone they’d fought over, he thought she
should start with a flip phone. “This Dad, this is how we found you. Remember how Mom made
me set up ‘Find My iPhone’ and I said if you guys could track me, I had to track you too. I
tracked you. And you were rescued.”
Two decades later
After the long rehab, after the settlement with the city, after the paralegal graduation, after the
move to Tucson where the warmth kept his joints hurting a bit less, after becoming a
competitive master swimmer, after walking Alicia down the aisle—her arm in one hand, a cane in
the other—Warren sat in the backyard of their desert bungalow staring at the saguaro. Its
existence in his life still amazed him. Alicia joined him with mugs of iced tea.
“You know, old man,” she said between sips, “life’s gotten pretty boring. Maybe your cat days are over. You
miss any of the drama or the snow or the football?”
He looked at her brown eyes, the same shine as when they’d met thirty-five years before. “No,”
he said, “this is my last life.”
He slurped his tea and watched a hummingbird flit about a cactus blossom.
.
Francois Bereaud is a husband, dad, full time math professor, mentor in the San Diego Congolese refugee community, and mediocre hockey player. He writes, edits, and sometimes publishes. In September, Cowboy Jamboree Press will publish his first full manuscript, San Diego Stories. Read him at francoisbereaud.com.