“Everything happens for a purpose. Some souls are supposed to leave life quick.
There’s a lesson in it for them.”
(Bethany Campbell, Hear No Evil)
The man was looking down at the crushed body of a child. He wondered if it was a boy or a girl. Only someone who knew the child and the way he or she was dressed that day, just before they had crossed the street, might have known the child’s gender. In the current condition, a stranger, like the man who got out of his car, after hitting something on the road, could not tell. He was too shocked to do anything. He hoped that all would end by just staring at the torn little body, that the child would simply get up and go to the other side of the road. Or even better, he hoped that he would wake up from this nightmare in his own bed, dreaming, and lying next to his wife.
But this was not a dream. He felt the thick smoke enter his eyes and lungs, the smell of burnt grass was invading his nostrils, making him cover his mouth and nose with his right hand. His left hand was pulling hard at his dark hair as he was full of angst and utter disbelief, while part of his wrist hid his left eye. He wished that he could close both of his eyes, but he couldn’t. The pool of blood on the concrete and the severed flesh of that child’s body kept his one eye focused on the corpse.
The smoke that was encircling him and the dead body made visibility very low. He was standing behind his car with his head cast down. He thought that if he hadn’t driven so fast, maybe he would have seen the child crossing the street. But he had been driving in the fast lane, so he was supposed to drive fast. Still, he couldn’t believe that such a thing could have happened to him, especially now when everything seemed to have been changing for the better in his life. “It’s not my fault,” he started saying under his breath. “I couldn’t see!” He kept chanting these words, trying to convince himself that, indeed, it wasn’t his fault. He bent down and picked up into his arms the body of the child he had just killed. The body was so light. So young. So innocent.
Then he thought that he had heard a screeching sound coming from somewhere back on the main road. The sound was so painful to his ears that he immediately woke up from the dreamy reverie he had fallen into the moment he had stopped the engine of his car and slowly stepped out of it to see what he had hit. He was now fully aware of the dead body in his arms and the smoke surrounding him, and the screeching noise behind him. He looked around but couldn’t see a single soul. Maybe there were pedestrians looking at him. “No. That can’t be possible. They would have come over and tried to help me by now.” He looked to his left and to his right, but could see only smoke. He then looked up and thought he could make out the blue colour of the sky. No cars were passing by, there were no other children trying to cross the street. He was completely alone.
He put the lifeless body back onto the floor and looked for one last time at the child, sprawled on the road. Then he whispered once again to himself, “It’s not my fault.” He turned around and walked to his car. With his left hand on the door handle he hesitated. Just one second. His right hand was still covering his mouth and nose. He opened the door, started the engine, fastened the seatbelt, brought down the hand-brake, and stepped hard on the accelerator to speed away from the scene.
Before the accident Thanapol Somchai was driving back home to Bangkok from a resort in Khao Yai. The business meeting had gone very well. Finally, he thought, after almost half a year of struggling to keep his company afloat, he had now succeeded in getting an excellent contract with a chain of hotels and resorts, all from the Nakhorn Ratchasima province. He couldn’t desire anything more in his life. His wife had whispered to him, just before he was leaving on his two-day business trip, that she was pregnant again. They already had a two-year-old son, but he had always wanted a daughter.
He said his Buddhist prayers all the way from Bangkok to the resort where the meeting with a group of hotel owners was being held. He even stopped in Saraburi at a temple where a print of the Lord Buddha’s foot was worshipped at least once a year by many devote Thais. He hadn’t been there for a very long time, so he decided to make a quick detour. He paid his respects to the senior monks of the temple, made a substantial donation, and hoped that his luck would change.
And indeed, it did change. The hotel owners were impressed by his presentation and decided to employ his company for advertising in the major provinces of the Kingdom. On the second day they all signed the contracts, and he was on his way home with a wholesome two and a half million bahtworth of orders. In the car he loosened the knot of his tie, threw his jacket on the back seat, and set his cruising speed at 140 kilometers an hour. He wanted to get home as soon as possible and tell his wife the great news in person. Before he left the resort he had called her, but was very evasive regarding the details of the deals that had been agreed upon and signed. He just told her to prepare something very special for dinner and wait for him to return. It would have been an amazing evening, with both of them ending in each other’s arms and dreaming of a better future for their children, as a happily content family.
However, the plans had now changed, somewhat dramatically. He was fleeing the scene of the accident in which a young child had died, having been smashed into an unrecognizable form by the force of his own car. He was no longer only a rising businessman, soon to be the father of two children, but also a criminal of manslaughter, or possibly to be even convicted as a murderer. “It was not my fault!” he kept repeating, as if chanting a Buddhist sutra.
He had to do something with his car. With the windshield broken and splattered with blood, and the front bumper dented, he was just a sitting duck for the traffic police. But he knew what he had to do. He drove off the main road, found a small soi that seemed deserted, and with the drinking water he had stored in the trunk at the beginning of the return trip he washed the blood off the windshield. Now that one identification clue was out of the way, he got back onto the main road and drove slowly until he reached the outskirts of Bangkok. Once he was there he stepped on the acceleration pedal and deliberately drove the car into a ditch to create a reason for the damaged windscreen and the dented bumper. When he recovered from the shock he felt a terrible ache on his forehead. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw a thin red line of blood rolling down his forehead.
Staggering, he got out of the car, climbed up the ditch, sat down on the grass and waited for someone to call for help. To attract the onlookers’ attention at himself and not the car, fearing that one could still tell that he had been in another accident before he fell into the ditch, he left his blood flowing down his nose and dripping onto his lap. The traffic police, the ambulance, and his insurance agent arrived in no time. After the police had pulled the car back onto the road, after the paramedics had bandaged his head, and after the insurance agent had taken appropriate photos of the accident, Thanapol insisted on driving back home by himself.
“I’m all right. I’m all right,” he kept saying to anyone there who tried to convince him to go directly to the hospital first and have his car taken to the repair garage by someone else.
“No, no, I have to go back home. My wife is waiting for me. She is pregnant with my baby.”
They let him depart and he reached his house about one hour later. His wife was sitting on the porch, while his little son was playing on the grass in front of her. Thanapol was so happy to see them both. He decided he would never tell his wife about the dead child. Never. Ever.
As he was parking the car in front of the house he heard the awful screeching sound again. This time it was much louder than the last time he had heard it. A terrible pain in his chest made his breathing extremely difficult. The screeching stopped with a thud and he felt like there was something very heavy on his chest. Then all was total darkness and silence.
The police officer who had first arrived at the scene of the accident finished typing the report. It read: “Due to low visibility caused by the smoke coming from burning grass, Thanapol Somchai ran over Pareena Nataporn, a nine-year-old girl who was crossing the street. Under shock, Thanapol Somchai got out of his car and picked the girl up into his arms. At that same moment, a truck hit the man and the girl, pinning them both to the back of the car involved in the first accident. Thanapol Somchai died instantly.”
Glossary:
baht – Thai currency
Khao Yai – a National Park and an outdoor recreation and camping resort in Thailand.
soi – side street
Sutra – a sermon or a dialogue from the Lord Buddha
Illustration by Katherine Jones
Initially published in The Rage of a New Ancestor:
2010 New Asian Writing Short Story Anthology (2nd edition).
Declan O’Sullivan (ed.), New Asian Writing, 2010, 152 p.
Available at: Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk or CreateSpace or Smashwords
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