Another one.

For God's sake, she had ruined another one.

Mike was going to have a coronary once he heard that she had managed to chase away another story, make a few more enemies, punch a trillion holes in one more opportunity. This had been her chance. Her final pitch. It had been absolutely imperative to sink a solid interview with the weapons dealer; imperative to her career, to the paper, and to herself.

Come on, Mike. Trust me. You let me have this guy and I'll write a Pulitzer.

That's right. No problems. No fights. I can do this. I swear, Mike.

Charlotte slammed her palm against the steering wheel of the rental and swore. The tires whispered indistinct words back at her as she hummed down the freeway, and the car seemed to vibrate with silent laughter. Silent taunts. She closed her eyes and tightened her hands on the wheel, clenching her teeth and trying to work out what the hell she was going to say to her editor.

Trying to imagine what he would say.

The tires – churning the air like centrifuges – filled in his words softly.

You're fired, kid.

“Bastard,” she hissed and punched the radio on. Stilted Spanish slipped out of the speakers like grains of sand. Sand that passed through her pores and into her bloodstream and under skin. Chafing. Everything was chafing. She was hot and tired and she wanted a cold beer and a good sleeping pill.

Charlotte pressed the search button and sifted through the channels.

All of the music was sand.

All of the words needled her like ten-inch syringes.

The whole situation had screamed failure, really. Charlotte had ignored her shrink, her doctor, and her pharmacist and had decided she could do things without the God-awful drugs. She decided that she didn't need dime sized pills to put her life on crutches. To hand her her own marionette strings.

Drugs were drugs.

And she liked feeling independent.

So she had gone into the interview without her medicated facade, without the little bullet shell straitjackets, with all her mental inhibitions unshackled and throbbing like so many fire ants, writhing erotic dances and spitting splinters of self-righteous indignity. Unstrapped. Uncaged.

She went in there hot.

And, Godssakes, she let the fire get away from her.

The bridge – an expansive, iron cable braided, titanic structure lying prostrate across waters that were already turbulent – had just been burned.

Very efficiently, too.

Charlotte shook her head and switched off the radio. What had she been thinking? Why the hell had she taken this job? Benjamin Partridge was her antithesis. For her, for everything she stood for, he was Satan incarnate. And she had had the self-assurance to talk to him. To reason with him. To make small talk and coax a few buzzwords out of him for a front page headline. The job had been trembling with on weak knees and narrow stilts and it had been prognosticated for collapse.

Another crumbling house of cards.

She just wasn't good enough. She didn't have the skill or the journalistic tenacity or the self-control to do anything right. Charlotte bit her lip and took the airport exit, her hands shuddering, shaking. Feelings of inadequacy seeped down the walls of her stomach and pooled their like cement. Cement that was expanding. Pushing gently on her chest, constricting her lungs, asphyxiating her heart.

She desperately wanted to hurt something.

Kill something.

She imagined the steering wheel in her hands as the stock of a gun, conforming under her touch, smooth and slipstream. Metal as sensual as skin brushing against skin.

She imagined lifting this gun slowly – a smile cracking across the geometry of her face – and pointing it. Pointing it anywhere, pointing it at anyone, and pulling the trigger.

Pointing it at her head.

Pointing it at herself.

And pulling the trigger.

Her blood buttered across the windshield, creating lazy crimson streams, and coagulating on the dashboard. A broken smile. Fragmented satisfaction. And all-inclusive, gratifying rest. Cold air. Hoarfrosted Marinara trench depths.

Sinking.

Drifting under a trillion crushing tons of water, strands of her hair leaking from her head, erect like some kind of Medusan hairstyle. A rag doll. Drifting towards little breaths of light in the distance, in the distance below her feet, filtering through her closed eyes like sunlight through leaves – stained glass in outdoor cathedrals.

A car horn.

Charlotte's eyes snapped open and she swerved out of the left hand lane, her grip tightening on the steering wheel, her heart punching holes in her chest. She checked the rearview mirror and swore again. Her breathing was like torn strips of cotton. Ragged and weak and afraid.

For God's sake, why hadn't she taken her medicine?

Why wasn't she taking it now?

Charlotte, you feel even a whisper of suicide, you pop these God-awful things until it goes away.

Charlotte checked her mirrors again, steadied the wheel and leaned into the opposite seat for her purse. Her pills – her neatly molded bits of psychological salvation – were tucked inside the side pocket. Her fingers played roulette with the cap and she managed to tap two out. She checked the road.

To hell with these Spanish freeways.

And then her cell phone rang. Buried in her purse.

Adagio for strings.

It was Mike.

Another car horn. Louder, screaming. Discordant and dissonant curses, blistering sounds. Charlotte glanced up to see the car plunge into her hood as the cellphone clutched in her hand sweetly serenaded in chorus with the blaring horn.

The windshield ruptured into a storm of constellations, spilling into the cab like so many newly sharpened razor blades.

Charlotte felt her body shoved forward, jackknifing under the seat belt and a white mushroom cloud exploded from the steering wheel and punched her in the chest. She gasped. The rental crumpled under it's own weight, spinning graceful pirouettes, and flipped over into the ditch as traffic sang past.

And darkness – that same welcome, smothering darkness; an evolving blastocyst in a pregnant gun chamber – was drawn over her eyes like a creased paper bag.

-------

I realize now that cell phones were very crude in the early nineties and that they were more or less the size of book and that it's doubtful they had any kind of ringtone variety. I'll change it eventually, I suppose...