Tomorrow

The seat belt held his torso suspended. He couldn’t feel anything from the waist downwards. Or was it upwards? He couldn’t tell. He winced as another strain of pain shot from his back to his skull. He must’ve fractured something behind as well. His entire frame was a receptacle of hurt. Something warm wormed its way down from his chest to the left side of his chin and divided into two rivulets. As both sleeked their slow journey further down, one streamlet made it over his lower lip and into his mouth. He tasted his own blood.

But his attention was riveted elsewhere.

From what was left of the broken side mirror of the car, he craned his neck, forcing his body to adjust as little as was possible to see the path down the road from which he’d just passed. The effort only served to dish out more pain. He screamed involuntarily. The hurting came from a jammed foot underneath the crumpled dashboard. Or what used to be a dashboard.

Yet, he still obdurately continued his effort to look behind at the road. Was it worth it?

Exactly two minutes ago, Adi was driving back home. It was one of those weekends where his attention was needed in the office. He never got used to working weekends and always thought it was a violation of his hours of rejuvenation wherever it was required of him to be in the office when the rest of the natural world was resting. The only difference this weekend was that it was on a project that he had initiated and that had become the model for new market innovation by the company and for which he had received a personal note of appreciation from the oga patapata. In fact, his exhilaration today was that his line manager, Isa had confided in him that the boss was putting Adi’s name up as subsequent line manager when Isa leaves in two months.

Adi knew what that meant. He was on the move up. It had been hectic getting to where he was. The sleepless nights spent in school trying to make the grades. His penniless parents who sacrificed life and limbs putting him through school. His 4-year sojourn as a “will-work-for-peanuts” job applicant whose shoes were angry at him for inhumane treatment. His loss of friends who went on to big jobs, happy marriages and the lifestyles of the “employed and married”. His perpetual “friendzoned” status among those who only dated those with white-collar jobs. He had quietly exited all that inglorious past without fanfare and now, he was going to even levels not imagined by his ever supportive and now contented parents.

Adi was going up. And he was going to celebrate this news as he always did. With his parents.

Tomorrow.

He would surprise them with a visit. He’d be waiting for them when they return from church. Their new apartment which he’d paid for in full on their behalf was only an hour’s drive from where the company accommodated key members of staff like Adi. So, it will be a thoroughly enjoyable Sunday. He had earlier made plans to see a movie that Sunday. It was about an accident survivor who was thought to have flat-lined and pronounced medically dead for all of 5 minutes. Only to live to tell his story of the out-of-body experience he had for those minutes. That was right up Adi’s alley. The kinds of things that excited him. But that movie will have to wait. This news of his elevation trumped that movie and as he drove home from work this Saturday, he envisioned his parents' reaction to the news that their child…

That was when the image of someone else’s child crossing the road while Adi was speeding through came into his field of vision.

And everything slowed down like in the movies …

Adi glanced at the rear view mirror. There was a Toyota Carina four seconds behind him at quite the same speed as he was going. Just behind the Carina was a Honda Accord. He didn’t have the time to know how fast that was travelling as he engaged his brakes. The screeching was loud. He spun the wheel, drifting to place his Mazda horizontally across the vertical travel of the road. This gave him enough time to look right (to see the wide-eyed shock of the child who stood transfixed in the middle of the road not more than ten normal paces from where Adi’s Camry stood like a bulwark of protection) and look left to see the panic on the face of the woman driving the Carina.

And then impact.

As the woman attempted to brake and minimise the impact with Adi, she was rammed into from behind by the Accord whose driver was in a haste to go see the premier league opener between his team and another. The force of the collision drove the Carina violently into the midriff of Adi’s Mazda, mangling the part where the driver’s door meets the frame. It sent a jolt through the entire form of Adi’s body but he’d never have imagined what it’ll do to his car.

It was too fast for the mind to register. He could only remember being spun over and over and the violent contractions his seat-belt bound body endured. He couldn’t number the knocks his head got nor describe the searing pain that he felt when the dashboard caved in on his torso. In less than a minute he’d gone from thoughts of Sunday to a wreck of hurtful proportions.

When the car finally stopped wheels-up, he’d no idea he was upside down. All he cared about at that moment was trying to see if he’d been successful. Was the sacrifice worth it? Did the child escape unhurt? Was he now safe? A scream had escaped Adi just a few seconds ago but he still laboured to find out. If he could just spin his body a little, it’ll allow him stretch his neck enough to see the rest of the road from where he was suspended on the upturned crumpled remains of his car.

As he forcibly stretched, a scrappy metal edge of the door frame sliced through the vein in his left arm, letting out a stream of warm, gushing blood. Adi felt the warmth not the pain. He still stretched some more. But the blood loss was too much. He willed his body to move more trying to see the road and see the child safe. It was not to be.

As his body became limp, his eyes closed of their own accord.