Jackknife
©February 6th, 2019
A Short, Short Story by Vijaya Sundaram
The rain came down like silk knives.
The rain came down like silk knives, and sliced the air into thin strips that dripped in the darkness. The car that drove through it contained one occupant, who gazed at the rain, as she drove on.
The rain came down like silk knives, and the car that drove through it, whose occupant gazed ahead, cut through the knives of silk like a blunt scimitar, parting the silk roughly and carelessly.
The occupant of the car which drove through the rain which came down like silk knives had a Swiss Army Knife in her hand, and was trimming her nails, humming a tune, keeping her eyes on the road, and looking down periodically between intervals of silk-knife-strips on her windshield whose wipers went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and whose rhythm accompanied her humming. She felt aloof and disinterested. She had no sense of where she was going, and didn’t really care. It had been a hard year, and she shielded herself from pain with distraction after distraction.
The lights turned red, then green, then red again. The occupant in the car stayed put at the intersection, and hummed on, intent on cutting her nails, and filing them carefully.
No one was behind her. It was nine-thirty at night, and the road was blank, like a washed sheet. She had all the time in the world. Then, the lights turned green again, and she unpressed the brake pedal, still looking up, then down, humming. She began to cut her last nail, and drove ahead.
The truck-driver at the intersection on her right didn’t look up from his GPS at the exact moment that she didn’t look up from her last nail.
The rain didn’t stop.
Jackknife.
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