Deadweight

This morning, I witnessed the most bizarre thing. So, as the fresh trauma settled in, I rushed to do what I always do to cope with horrible things; I wrote a story about it.

My first instinct to write about things to regain some sense of clarity, or some control over the situation, started when I began keeping a dream journal for my frequent nightmares. About four years ago, I started to flesh out some of those nightmares into short stories, and it helped me cope with them. I found inspiration and intrigue in them instead of only fear.

I’ve since started writing about the horrific reality I’ve seen, too. Something about sitting in front of a keyboard and pouring my thoughts onto a page, and going over it to understand it, has really helped me through the years to not only understand myself better, but to slow down and think about the things that have happened so I won’t bury them. Burying the bad stuff, including difficult emotions, will only lead to distress later, so dissecting it all in the moment, or shortly after, or even years later to some degree, is what has helped me survive.

So in similar fashion, I decided to write out what happened this morning, as if it were a narrative. I don’t know all of the details, and I had some skips in memory due to the traumatic nature of what I saw, so my mind began to fill in the blanks as I showered after the incident. This story is just what I witnessed and my thoughts at the time, spun into a somber story-telling style to make it make sense.

And it still doesn’t.

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I awoke at dawn to a loud crack outside. Not the crack of thunder, as it was sunny and quiet in the early morning’s glow. The crack of a gunshot.

I jolted awake and grew annoyed. I’d only fallen asleep five hours previous, and I had grocery shopping to do that day that would zap my limited energy. Still, the panic that rushed through me was enough to boost me out of bed. I walked over to the window with fear of the inevitable. Someone must have fired a gun out on the street, although I heard no voices or other sounds. It was as if the crack had been swallowed by the peace of nature, its mother not wanting the serene to be disturbed.

I pried the blinds open with my fingers, and I looked across the back road. A police car sat in front of my yard, and by the train tracks was a running but immobile truck with a small trailer. In the parking lot of the nature trail across from my house, a white pickup truck remained idle with fog emitting from the tailpipe in the cold.

A police officer dragged a body across the pavement toward the pickup truck.

The limp man’s form slid like a weightless ragdoll across the asphalt, his head hanging with the rest of his limbs. Lifeless. A deadweight. The officer gripped the body’s arm with both hands as he tugged, like he was dragging a heavy load of trash to the dumpster.

I held my breath. I shouldn’t have seen that.

Nothing disturbed the peace of the morning as I backed away from the blinds. My mind paused, dipped into a void of nothingness, and then rebooted. I found myself sitting on my bed, contemplating whether sleep was still an option or would remain a longing in the back of my mind; a mind that couldn’t comprehend the reality of the gristly sight.

Reality ripped apart as my vision grew blurry. Was there blood? I don’t remember seeing any. Where were the sounds? Shouldn’t there be sounds to such a horrible scene, other than the crack of a weapon?

I dreaded peeking through the blinds once more, but I stood anyway. I’d been witness to something that shouldn’t be seen, that was often swept away before anyone could receive the second-hand trauma.

I peered through the blinds once more.

Nothing.

My pulse increased as I searched the area. Not so much as a bloodstain. It was as if nothing had happened at all, and the morning’s quiet was justified.

I backed away. Had I hallucinated it all? I drifted back over to my bed, unsure of how much time had passed. Perhaps I’d been absent from reality — dissociating — for longer than I realized. I looked down at my cat, who stared at the window, unnerved. Just like he had been when the crack resounded. No, I’m not crazy, then. It really did happen.

The void claimed my mind once more. There were no ambulances. No emergency technicians, no body bag, no procedure. All three vehicles were gone. It was as if it had never happened at all, or was some kind of residual haunting.

I blinked away the blurriness in my vision. The sight of the limp body dragging across the ground haunted the backs of my eyelids, and I shook my head. I shouldn’t go back to sleep.

©2023 Shane Blackheart