Time

Ona’s grandmother used to say the land on the side of the highway was once a peat bog. It looked fairly solid, but if you stepped on it, you’d sink through thousands of years of decay and be swallowed up by the earth. Soon after, the little mushrooms sprouting up on the surface and leeching up your body’s nutrients would be the only reminder of where you had disappeared.

People went missing all the time then, before it dried up and tree seedlings from the other side of the highway could take root. Grandma Faye would tell tales of walking over the land and tripping on a femur sticking out of the ground, or digging up the peat to burn and finding a spine or the broken pieces of a child’s skull. Ona always wondered how many people lived under the ground where she played. She wondered whether or not the skeletons in the earth could hear her laughter reverberating through the tires of the car and into the ground. Maybe they could feel it. Their ears were probably clogged with earth. Sometimes Ona thought she could hear the people’s choked laughs.

Fifteen years ago her grandmother drove their old beat up Renault Caravelle over the edge of the highway. She took out a guard rail and plowed her way through the underbrush for at least three hundred yards until the car met an oak tree where it remains to this day. Grandma Faye wasn’t the sort of person the police cared to look for as she was generally too feral for common society. Ona and her friends had looked for her grandmother for weeks afterwards, but to no avail. She thought her Grandmother had simply left her to be taken into foster care. She must have grown tired of Ona. It was only until years later that she found the car in the wilderness while she was wandering around with Pete and the others.

The four of them were about fourteen and the sky was gray with clouds. An eerie silence permeated the air in the dense underbrush. When Ona saw it, she stopped dead in her tracks while the other three walked onwards chatting idly, having not seen it yet. “Stop!” she shouted.

Charmaine and Morris’ heads whipped towards her with their eyes wide, but Pete had seen the car just after Ona, and his face had gone white. “Ona, that’s what I think it is, isn’t it?”

She silently nodded as she looked at it. The Renault’s flat tires were halfway sunken into the dirt, with long grass growing through the little holes in the worn out rubber. The front headlights were smashed, though no glass could be found on the surface, as it had sunken into the mushy ground long ago.

Ona slowly walked forwards past the others, and Pete quietly followed. “Don’t go near it, there’s probably going to be raccoons or a homeless person in there.” His eyes were wide with fear, with his hands nervously running through his hair. “We should leave before something jumps out at us.” Him and Charmaine hadn’t known Ona when Grandma Faye was around. Only Pete had known her for that long.

Ignoring Morris, Ona walked over the damp ground towards it and the long grasses shivered against her legs as she got closer. She tried shining a flashlight into the driver’s side window, but the glass was so dirty that no light managed to illuminate the inside. She reached for the handle and Charmaine darted forward and pulled her back by the shoulder before she could grab it, “No, this is a bad idea.”

Ona pushed Charmaine away, “If you’re scared, just get out of here.” She had a stormy expression on her face. “This is my grandmother’s car.”

Charmaine stepped away with her mouth open in shock, and Morris had his eyes squeezed shut as Ona turned back to the door of the car. with his hands covering his ears as the others whispered scary thoughts to one another. She looked back at the others and shrugged, then reached for the door handle.

“Don’t do it!” Morris blurted out just as she wrenched the door open, breaking through the years of accumulated rust that had sealed the car shut. The noise echoed through the trees and scared a murder of crows in the nearby oak tree and flew off with angry caws as she peered curiously inside.

Dim light filtered through the grimy windows illuminating the dirt, dust, and animal droppings that coated the seats and floor. Thick tree roots had pierced through the floor of the cab and were coiled around the gas and brake pedals, rendering them immobile. There was no sign of her grandmother anywhere. There were a few worn out blankets in the back seat as well as an empty kerosene lamp with a fine layer of dirt covering everything. The back window was broken and someone had used a staple gun to fix an old striped blanket to the inside corners of the window, probably to keep the wind out. Clearly someone had been living in it at some point, but they were long gone by now.

Ona climbed into the car and into the back and sat down on the torn up leather of the seat. She leaned her head back against the headrest and looked up at the ceiling and heaved a great sigh.

“Come on guys, there’s nothing dangerous in there. It would have gotten Ona by now.” Pete said to the other two and climbed into the car.

Charmaine quickly put on a brave face so as to not seem like a wimp like Morris and said, “Okay, yeah, there’s probably only some bugs, we can handle bugs.” But her eyes were still wide and on alert for danger as she crept closer.

When Pete came by everyday to give her food, she tried to lighten the grim expression that had carved deep lines into his face after so many years of trying to get her out of the car. She couldn’t remember the last time he smiled, and was determined to get him to see reason. “Not everyone finds the place they belong in the world,” she used to tell him. “We’re the lucky ones who have found it.”

….

“Can’t you see I’m happy, Pete?” Ona asked, trying to look into his eyes. He hadn’t had a haircut in a long while and his scraggly gray-brown hair long fell in front of his face. Even then he always kept his head bent down towards the food in his lap, avoiding her gaze as he raised a forkful of food to her mouth. Ona received it, knowing it made him feel better that she continued eating though it wasn’t something she cared for any long. She wished he would let her feed herself. But after what happened with Morris a few years ago, she hadn’t been allowed to touch the silverware anymore.

Ona studied Pete’s frown as she chewed, as it was the only visible part of his face. He was unshaven and crusty, with a thin layer of dirt coating his greasy skin as his lips twisted downwards as if forcing himself to keep his mouth shut. His clothes were sweat stained and a foul odor was coming off him that had gotten worse and worse in the last few weeks since the incident with Charmaine. It broke her heart to see him letting himself go in his distress; unable to accept their destiny. Ona figured their old friend had been his last hope, a sort of assertion that it wasn’t up to him what happened to all of them, because at least Charmaine was off having her own life. God they are so selfish, she thought.

“I really wish you hadn’t put her in the trunk with Morris.” she said.

Pete jerked and dropped the fork and it bounced across the floor and landed by her left foot. She thought he was going to reach for it, but Pete just sat there staring down towards her feet and the fork where the roots had wrapped around her ankles. He was shaking.

Ona leaned forward and reached her hand towards his face. “I can hear them whispering and laughing together at night. Why did you let them stay together and leave me alone in here?”

When her fingers brushed his cheek he began to tilt his head towards the comfort of her hand, but suddenly pulled he himself back out of her reach and his gaze snapped up for the first time in weeks. His eyes were wide and searching her face, “Ona, I wasn’t going to watch their bodies rot in here with you. They were my friends.”

“They are our friends.” she said firmly. “This is our home, and we’ll all be together again one day. Just like we used to when we were kids.” she said, deepening the misery lines on his face. “Don’t you remember what it was like when we first saw this place?”

Pete shook his head dismissively and grabbed the dirty blankets in the back to take up to the laundromat and then turned around to exit the car from the driver’s side door. “I don’t want to hear about when we were kids.” he said, and left the car, heading back up to his little rundown house just a few miles away.

Ona took a deep breath and ran her fingers through her filthy hair as she sat in the musty backseat of the old car and prayed to herself that Pete would change his mind one day. He wasn’t like the others. Ona knew their other friends would never have chosen to stay, they thought they were bigger than destiny. But Pete had stayed and she loved him for that. Soon all of the anger and disagreements would be behind them. She would forget how Pete used to call her deranged, and he would help the others out of the back and into their proper seats just like they used to sit when they were kids, laughing and playing games late into the night. She imagined he would know the completeness she felt in their little home as she looked out the grimy windows at the big dark sky. He would smile at her as they died together. But for now she would settle with reminiscing.

….

Those days no one went to that area except underage teens looking for a hidden place to get drunk or light up. It was just the side of the highway, a liminal space to view out a car window on one’s way to town. The presence of the car never changed the fact that the dried bog was nowhere civilized people wanted to be. The remnants of civilization are always disdained by those that live in it. Perhaps one day a thousand years from now, people would find the car, and they would find the bodies and dream about what life had been like back then. How quaint and otherly the bog people’s lives must have been before they were consumed. How odd that the ones in the car don’t have the same decomposition markers. Maybe they were from a different time, Ona mused.

She remembered the summers after they found it when they would watch drunk highschoolers stumble around and lose their shoes in the still hungry spots of earth. Ona and the others would look out the windows at them and make scary noises to freak them out. The kids would watch them push each other as they tried to get away as fast as possible without vomiting up their liquor, and Ona and the others would laugh until they couldn’t breathe. They enjoyed being the monsters in the dark. The car was their hideaway, the place they could scream into the night and be embraced by the eerie silence. Time seemed to stretch out before them when they were there. It was a place they could dream up stories as the starlight let in just enough light to see each other. It was dirty and rundown, and that was why they liked it so much, or at least why Ona liked it so much. She was free to just be when she was in the car.

It must have looked the same fifty years, even a hundred years ago in some other reality, though she knew it couldn’t be that old. But she knew that far into the future it would remain there resting among the weeds and bracken, until the undergrowth finally swallowed it up along with the many worlds that once lived within. When the roots of the nearby trees crushed the cab like a tin can, breaking the clean bones of the skeletons in the seats as they urged on the degradation, maybe the friends gleeful laughs would ring out into the night once more. As the car’s essence seeped into the ground and into the world around, they would live on.

….

“We belong in Time.” Ona whispered to herself.

Pete hadn’t been back in a few days and her lips were dry and cracked. Though she had told him over and over she didn’t want anything to eat, now that the smell of food hadn’t penetrated her nose for some time, she was beginning to remember her early days of staying in the car alone. When Pete had found her after a few weeks and nursed her back to health he had promised to stay with her. Where is he now? She thought, starting to panic. How many days has it been? I can’t die in here without him next to me. Where are the others?

Oh. They’re still in the trunk, she remembered with irritation. Ona looked out the windows and saw the sun rising in the distance, bathing the land in a cold yellow light. It had been quite a bit warmer the last time Pete had been there, but now she was very chilly. She looked around the back for those old blankets that they used to sit on, but couldn’t find them. Maybe someone had taken them out a few years ago. She couldn’t remember. She leaned forward to reach under her seat to see if they were hidden beneath her and suddenly stopped. The fork Pete had dropped last time was still by her left foot.

She noticed it still had a little bit of dried food caked on, and she slowly picked it up. The cold metal against her skin made her shiver in her seat. The last time she had touched silverware, she had managed to gut Morris with only a spoon, and Pete banned her from using it. That hadn’t stopped her from strangling Charmaine when she came to confront her after so many years of Pete keeping it a secret. But now it seemed that Pete might not be coming back. Ona’s empty stomach twisted with longing. It was supposed to be the four of them together. Ona in the back right seat, Pete in the back left, Charmaine in the driver’s seat, and Morris in the front passenger’s seat. He has to come back.

Ona examined the fork in her hands, running her fingers over the sharp tines as she looked down at the roots encapsulating her feet. Pete’s never going to take the others out of the trunk himself, she thought, and swiftly she brought the fork down on the roots, breaking one of the tines off. She frowned and then began scraping at the wood, and little bits of wood started peeling away. She smiled and continued, occasionally scraping her own skin by accident, but it didn’t matter. The blood moistened the wood and allowed her to wiggle her crushed feet in their constraints.

Soon she was able to wrench herself free, and clawed her way out of the car. Stepping down onto the ground with legs that hadn’t held her weight in over a decade, she collapsed and started crawling on her hands and knees toward the back and scrabbled at the latch to the trunk. which finally unlatched after hours of painstakingly scratching at the rusty metal. Bugs rushed out of the trunk as she opened it, and a centipede crawled out which Ona quickly snatched up and downed desperate with hunger. She shakily pulled herself up to her feet, leaning heavily on the edge of the trunk and looked inside at the bodies. Morris had decomposed almost fully; but Charmaine still smelled of sweet rot. Ona leaned forward to stroke their faces. “You don’t have to worry, my friends. I’ll put you back where you’re supposed to be.”

It took her two days to drag the bodies back into their seat, and nearly all of her energy was spent by the time she managed to pull herself back into her spot in the back. As she lay there in the back, Ona felt like she was burning up, her throat was drier than it had ever felt, and though her heart was beating fast, she could feel her blood moving sluggishly through her veins. Soon dark spots kept appearing in her vision when she moved her head too quickly towards the left window where she still was expecting Pete to show up.

Ona started practicing the last conversation they would have before they died.

“I don’t understand why you can’t accept that it’s our destiny, Pete,” she said to no one. Charmaine’s stench was filling up the car and making her choke.

She imagined the way he would hang his head once more and look down at the food she had half-eaten. A bit of it had spilled onto the floor in the back and he pulled out a napkin from his back pocket to clean it up and she grabbed his wrist.

He let her hold onto him and looked at her dirty hands with her torn nails. “We’re matching now,” he said with a sad smile. “I’m almost as filthy as you, these days.”

Ignoring his words, she brought her face close to his, forcing his chin up with her fingers and she peered into his pained eyes. “You know, decay is just another form of life,” she said. “We won’t die in any way that really matters.”

He took a deep sigh, and it seemed like he was letting a breath out that had been trapped in his lungs for years. “You really think we’ll live on in time?” he asked.

She nodded solemnly, gripping the beaten-up fork tightly in her fist and suppressing her glee behind her lips. She searched his tired face and knew he had given up.

“Do it quickly,” he said, and Ona let the smile she was holding in overcome her face.

Ona looked out the window one last time and thought she saw his figure in the distance, though it was too dark to tell. She tried to pull herself up, but her body was so weak, and her head began spinning with dizziness that she quickly fell back to the comfort of the seat. Her fingers trailed down to where the scraps of roots lay on the floor. She closed her eyes as Pete’s faint outline came closer. She didn’t open them again.