Here to Infinity
by Ryan Brosmer
Jennifer etched out her own gravestone when she was nine. After the cement truck pulled away she grabbed a stick and crossed over the tape the city workers had put up. The barricade of traffic cones and caution tape was nothing she couldn’t handle.
“Jennifer Engel
1996-Infinity”
Her parents smiled at it every morning when they left the house. The new sidewalk made the neighborhood brighter, and that block in particular, right on the other side of their front gate. They tried to step over it each time they left, a little hop-skip from the gate to the car door. Despite their best efforts the rough edges around her name were softened by time and the traffic of their neighbors.
Jennifer never thought much of it afterward. It was one day, after school, a lazy spring afternoon. For Jennifer, the excitement started with the construction being in the way of the school bus and it ended when the stick snapped as the cement hardened. She went inside to watch TV.
Her parents noticed the next morning on their way out the door and confronted Jennifer about it that afternoon once they all were home.
“We’re not mad. But what if you had ruined your shoes or your clothes?” her mom said.
“What if you’d fallen in and gotten stuck?” Mr. Engel said with a laugh that elicited a nervous smile from Jennifer, not yet sure if they really were mad at her. She had mostly forgotten about it. The cones were gone when she left for school in the morning and she walked right over her etching. The stick lay snapped in two in the middle of the front yard.
“So what? You’re going to live to infinity, huh?” her mom said.
“To infinity and beyond! Right?” her dad said, thrusting his arm triumphantly in the air and letting it land as a soft pat on his daughter’s head.
“I guess so. Why not?” Jennifer said blandly. Her attention didn’t wander too far from the television.
She became her parents’ “Infinity girl” from then on.
They’d say, “Because you’re our everything.”
Once she was in middle school Jennifer was able to walk to and from the school. It was a 15-minute walk. The bus ride would have taken 30 minutes because all of the kids in her neighborhood were spread out. Most of the parents didn’t want their children walking to school, they thought the bus was safer and if their taxes were paying for it then their kids had better get some use out of it. Jennifer liked getting the 15 minutes extra sleep and the walk in the morning helped her wake up and the walk home let her cool down and collect her thoughts.
Jennifer would ride the bus some days in the wintertime, when it got really cold, or when it was raining too hard. During the fall of her eighth grade year the weather couldn’t have been more agreeable. Those walks were some of her favorite moments. She was excited for middle school to be ending with high school just around the corner. Also, Jennifer had her first boyfriend, and when she got to school each morning he was already there because his mom dropped him off on her way to work and she always had to be there early. They held hands until the bell rang for homeroom. They would see each other again at lunch and again at the end of the day. He had to wait for his mom, whom was always late picking him up in the afternoons. Jennifer didn’t have a bus to catch, so she was in no hurry. They would sit out front on one of the brown metal benches, holding hands until his mom pulled around the bend at the entrance to the school. He didn’t think his mom would approve of him having a girlfriend, so that’s where they would say “bye” each day and Jennifer would begin walking home. Today had been no different. It was another beautiful fall afternoon with a low sun filling the sky and leaves covering the ground.
Jennifer’s parents both left work early that day. Her dad had to pick her mom up since they shared a car. She was out front waiting for him and didn’t say a word as she got in the car and slammed the door shut.
The school had called Mr. Engel at work. His daughter was in the hospital. Something about a vehicle. A collision.
“No, thank you, I’ll contact my wife,” he said. They didn’t have any answers. Just questions and condolences. They said they weren’t sure what had happened or what condition his daughter was in, but they seemed to be awfully sorry for him.
Jennifer was in the hospital, and when her parents arrived they were made to wait. She was in surgery. They were told she was hit by a school bus. The driver had just finished her route and was leaving the neighborhood when she blew through a stop sign and struck Jennifer. Her parents knew the intersection, right near the entrance to the neighborhood. The bushes could create a bit of a blind spot.
The surgery took hours. Doctors kept coming up to the Engels and telling them things about Jennifer like how there was pressure on her brain, and that they were having trouble getting the bleeding to stop. They weren’t sure that Jennifer would be the same even I they stabilized her. There could be brain damage, or she could be in a coma. They were told the doctors were doing their best. That’s all they could hope for anyway.
It was night when a doctor came to say that Jennifer had been stabilized. The bleeding was stopped and the pressure had been mostly relieved. They could see their daughter, but there was something. It was the coma.
They never got to see their daughter awake again. They spoke to her all day and night but never again heard Jennifer’s voice. She never woke from that coma and after a week her body gave out. Her heart failed and she was gone.
It was the end of the world for her parents. Infinity had arrived and there was nothing left.
Mr. Engel too ka hammer and chisel to the sidewalk out front of their house and pried out the slab of concrete that Jennifer had etched her life into. A few days later the city gave and refilled the spot and the sidewalk was back to normal. The missing slab hung over Jennifer’s bed. The etching was faded, almost perfectly flat once again.
It rained for nearly a week straight after the funeral. The Engels took that week off from work. The school bus drove by their house every morning. Family and friends came to visit every day. Jennifer was still gone every night.
END
they’re getting darker. i enjoyed this, but i wish that you’d been brave enough to portray the actual collision. Here is my attempt – please insert if you think that it’s good enough:
“Jennifer was thinking of her new boyfriend. He was pleasant and funny, rather like a dog one would meet in the road, although Jennifer despaired that the boy’s mother had to drive him the mile or so home from school as if was an invalid. Jennifer’s boots were swishing merrily through the leaves strewn across the path and perhaps she never knew that what had hit her was a bus, for suddenly the world was like a handful of dust thrown to the wind – just swirled away in the force and the noise – and Jennifer was momentarily cruising on a wave of fantastic energy, until she hit the road with a crunch and a tyre went over her skull with a great final pop!”