1. Fable #3
A horn blares, but it’s not mine, my hand isn’t on the horn, my hands are frozen on the wheel as the world spins into glass and metal and a sound that isn’t like anything I’ve ever heard before, a crunch that goes on forever, a shriek that might be brakes or might be me or might be the universe tearing itself in half.
My forehead hits something. The steering wheel, I think, or maybe the window, I can’t tell because everything is sideways and there’s warmth sliding down my temple and the windshield is a spiderweb of cracks, lit up by the last of the sunset like something almost beautiful.
The sky is where the ground should be.
Or maybe the ground is where the sky should be.
I can’t tell. I can’t tell anything. I can just lie here, held in place by the seatbelt that definitely engaged after all, and think:
I was almost there. I was so close. I was finally going to do it and now I’m…
Voices. Hands on the door. Someone is saying don’t move, don’t move, help is coming, but I can’t see who because my eyes won’t focus, won’t cooperate, keep sliding off everything, the whole world gone to water.
Am I dying? Is this what dying feels like? It’s very confusing. I thought there would be more clarity.
“Stay with me.”
A face appears in the shattered window, materialized there, it feels like, just appeared from the chaos outside, and my concussed brain, my ridiculous unreliable probably-bleeding brain, decides with absolute certainty that I am looking at an angel.
Sharp jaw, the kind that could cut glass or break hearts or both.
Black hair pushed back from a face that belongs in a museum or a dream or one of those books I sell to women who sigh over the covers.
Eyes the color of a storm that just learned how to grieve, gray, impossibly gray, focused on me with an intensity that makes me want to cry.
That’s not a person. That’s a hallucination. That’s my dying brain being nice to me, giving me something pretty to look at while I bleed out in my sad beige Subaru.
“You’re going to be fine,” the angel says, and his voice is so steady, so impossibly calm, like he’s never panicked about anything in his entire life. “Help is almost here. I need you to stay awake for me.”
“You’re very pretty,” I mumble, “for a hallucination.”
Surprise crosses that storm-cloud gaze. Or maybe amusement. It’s hard to tell when the world keeps tilting and my head keeps throbbing and my blood keeps sliding down my face in warm, lazy trails.
“I’m real.” A hand cups my cheek, broad and warm and impossibly gentle against my blood-streaked skin. “And you’re going to be fine. Can you tell me your name?”
“Fable.” The word comes out slurred, soft.
“Like the stories. My parents were…” I stop, because thinking about my parents right now seems like a bad idea, seems like a fast way to start crying, and I’m already bleeding, I don’t need to add crying to the list of fluids I’m losing.
“I own a bookstore. I sell romance novels. I was going somewhere brave.”
“That’s good. That’s really good. Keep talking to me.”
His other hand is doing something to my door, I realize, pulling at it, or pushing at it, making the crumpled metal groan in protest. He shouldn’t be able to move it.
It looks crushed, jammed, the frame bent in ways that metal isn’t supposed to bend.
But he’s pulling at it like it’s nothing, like it’s a minor inconvenience, and the door is…
The door is opening.
That’s not possible. That door was stuck. I saw it, it was…
“That’s exactly what a hallucination would say.” My voice sounds weird, thick and slow, like I’m talking through honey. “Are you here to take me somewhere? Is this the part where I see a tunnel with light at the end?”
“No tunnels.” He’s reaching for me now, hands sliding under my body with a care that makes my chest ache. “No light. Just me. Just you. And an ambulance about three minutes away.”
“That’s very specific.”
“I have good hearing.”
The seatbelt releases, he must have cut it, or undone it, I didn’t see, and then I’m being lifted out of the wreckage of my car like I weigh nothing at all, cradled against a chest with all the give of a wall.
He’s strong. He’s really, really strong. Too strong. Nobody’s this strong.
“I’ve got you.” His voice is right next to my ear, his heartbeat under my cheek, solid and steady, a metronome. “I’ve got you. Stay with me.”
Angels are probably strong, right? That tracks. Lifting people out of burning buildings is probably part of the job description.
“Pretty,” I manage, one more time, because if I’m dying I want my last word to be a compliment. That seems like good karma. That seems like the sort of act that gets you into heaven, telling an angel he’s pretty while you bleed on his very nice sweater.
“Stay with me,” he says again, and his voice sounds different now, strained in a way it wasn’t before. “Fable. Stay with me.”
But the dark is rushing up to meet me, warm and soft and welcoming, and the last thing I hear before it swallows me whole is his voice, somewhere above me, somewhere close:
“I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Stay with me.”