There's a gorgeous hand dangling out of the front seat window, a long cigarette stuck between two manicured fingers. There's a silver ring on the third one and not a single scar on the skin. The red nail polish is shiny and new.
A few cars down is a man and his daughter, racing violently down the street to reach Wherever. A huge, manly hand smashes the center of the wheel and a raging noise escapes. The daughter jumps in her seat, unsure why Wherever is urgent enough to scream at the other cars.
The other cars react accordingly—a crude finger here, an eye roll there. Some wonder what could ever call for such aggressive driving. Others relate. The gorgeous hand flicks her cigarette indifferently. Down the street from these hands are even more fingers gripping steering wheels and tapping on cell phones. A shiny boot slams on the breaks as a light turns from yellow to red. The boot wearer wonders how millions don't die every day on this very road. He waits for green, peeking through the windows on his left and right. A wrinkly woman on one side, two young girls on the other.
The wrinkly lady isn't just wrinkles, though. She has bright blue eyes that have seen the world, seen roads much worse than this one. Her smile lines are heavy from whatever happiness she's felt. Her wisdom makes her slow down on yellow and not speed up, even if a million Come On, Granny!'s sigh in frustration behind her. She presses the gas pedal gingerly as red turns to green. The two young girls screech by.
The music is deafening in this car. It shakes the girls' tiny bodies and the gravel beneath them. There's a dangerous carelessness that is becoming quite clear to the other hands and feet on the road. Wheels swerve away from their lane, sidewalk roamers stare. A red light is run. No one is hit, somehow.
The girls are still enveloped in the song playing on the radio. It reminds the driver of a boy she loved a year ago and the passenger of her sister back home. Neither one is concerned with the world around them, but maybe this is how it should be. The cigarette in the gorgeous hand has almost shriveled as it passes the two girls. All soon arrive in apartment complexes only miles apart.
Down the street, the man and his daughter have made it to Wherever and the wrinkly lady is home with her granddaughter. All the Come On, Granny!'s are winding through new streets and settling into parking spaces across the city, and the man in the boots made his dinner date on time. But a few streets down, a man lies dead several feet away from his motorcycle. The street is blocked off and police lights illuminate the evening sky. Even more cars find the windy road with all the fingers and toes. The motorcyclist was killed too violently to describe, but the online news spared no details.
Two young girls in their apartment scroll through the news article together, startled and frozen. The hurried man holds his daughter tight, thankful for the breath running through her. The wrinkled woman's granddaughter is shaken and adamant that her grandmother will never drive alone again, and the man in boots feels like the universe has somehow chosen to keep him alive.
And the girl with the gorgeous hands lights another cigarette on her balcony, thinking of the gruesome accident with pain in her chest. She picks up the phone and calls her mother for the first time in a year and a half, suddenly afraid of being too late for the rest of forever.
We live and we die, and the moments in between can seem mundane. Hands and feet, fingers and toes are nothing worth noticing until they're gone. Once they're gone, so is a soul from this earth, a life driving down our busy road. Life—the mundane, the real, the physical—can vanish in an instant.
