In the brief time I knew my father, he said, “You know what you were built for.” He said, “Don’t forget your purpose, son.” He said, “I think my neck will snap today.” My mother didn’t say a word.
Their skin, like mine, was smooth and tan. I was born with their tattoos. In my conception and birth I was their exact shape, dimension. Our shoulders, knees, the length of our fingers, the smell on our flesh, weak-wire necks, feet were all the same, measured exactly in every way. I came from the same giant mouth they did, built with the same fibers and molds.
My father and mother left me in the same way, dismembered, crushed, punched in the face from an airbag releasing too late, shaken with shards, cranking jerks. First it was she who was sent down the white track toward the wall.
My father looked on silently, unafraid, uneverything. When it was his turn, he plunged through the glass, cracking his skull on the windshield. He had known how he would die, and told me to prepare. I think my mother knew too, but didn’t know the words to say, because she didn’t think it would matter, because time was short and easily wasted on words, maybe even in thought. I was told she didn’t die immediately, but rather let her neck slack so far sideways that it snapped from the weight of her skull rocked violently from its center. She let it hang and break.
My cousins, grandparents, neighbors, all of us will be smashed in the same way. All of us are built alike — small, squinting slits curved gently inward for the resemblance of sockets, gentle noses that peak gently from our slick faces, mouths protruding slightly without the tracing of outlined lips. When our time comes, when it is our turn, some of us will flail our arms, some of us will hit hard plastic and smell fragrant rubber. Some of us will be just fine, hardly a mark left from impact, then thrown out in the giant blue bins because we have been used, contaminated. We will be buckled in, a thin fabric sheen of black clicking into place, and that will be the last sound we hear before the cracking aluminum, metal, concrete smashes inward on us, carving into us with giant, hungry teeth.
Men in white lab coats flutter like ghosts with brown clipboards in their aged hands. I think about the silver bands on some of their skinny fingers and wonder what that means. Their skin is pliant, wrinkled, their faces are different. They move so easily on their bending legs, balancing and shifting their torsos, mouths, hands. Something in me stirs like the flaps of their coats, a quick and sudden movement that I cannot express.
The other ones like me are quiet and focused on their task, the task of dying, of sitting down, strapping in, and letting death fly at them at eighty miles per hour, the open-faced white wall breaking up their insides and cracking open their skin, catapulting their weak skulls against the stark white that begs for stains. My family, stiff and awkward, no good at conversation or feeling, really, stand in a straight line, waiting for their turn.
And as I watch each car, their spinning wheels, their pointed snouts, shoot violently forward, and as I see the men in the coats, eager and fast, putting my grandmothers, nieces, nephews, into the leather seats and closing them in, and as I see the four others in front of me — the next to be smashed, the next to die — as I see all that separates me from the fate placed upon me, I do not think that I am ready to go. I am the first, of all the ones who had been made before me, to make a choice.
I step out of line.
Ashlyn Wheeler is a senior BFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago, where she works as a tutor for the Department of Creative Writing and as an editor for award-winning anthology Hair Trigger. Her previous work can be found as one of the Featured Stories at 101Words and in Hair Trigger 38.