Highway to Hell
Beth Livermore
Word Count 618
A police radio rattled next to my bed. I rolled over, tucked the blanket under my chin, and went back to sleep. It buzzed again, this time louder. “Shooting on I-475.” Possible suicide. “Finally,” I shouted, and jumped out of bed. This is what I had been waiting for. My ticket out of Flint.
Months before, I had moved to Michigan to build my portfolio. I was a decent photographer, but to get a newspaper job, which was my goal, I had to cover more hard news--things like crime, protests, and homicide. Flint Journal interns got plenty of practice.
Dressed in full winter gear, I hobbled across the icy driveway to my Cutlass Supreme. I turned the key and prayed it would start. The motor pounded once, twice, then thawed into a whirr. Thank goodness. I needed to hurry.
I had company for the first part of my drive. Neighbors’ kitchens glowed with pre-dawn eggs and coffee as workers got ready for their factory shifts. On the highway, I was alone. Nothing but fog, snow drifts, and one crippled salt truck, limping along in iron chains.
I must be getting close, I thought, hovering over the wheel, squinting to read mile markers. Suddenly, the fog thinned and I saw it. An abandoned sedan, parked on the shoulder, driver’s door open. I inched over, tentatively, and parked behind the car. This must be it. But, where were the cops, the sirens, the usual chaotic mix? It didn’t matter, I told myself. Time to go to work.
I opened my door, stepped into the wind and looked up at a marble sky, hard and colorless but for three gray veins. I walked towards the car.
At first, I saw nothing. No gun, no blood, no body. That was weird. I continued, up towards the front bumper, to peek around the corner.
That’s when I saw it—a fully intact brain, shaped like a walnut, slick as squid.
I froze. Is that even possible? Could a skull pop open and fling out its jelly organ like some Jack-in-the-Box? Hypnotized by this bizarre and beautiful orb, I crouched down on my knees and lifted my camera. Twisting the focus rings for a closer, better look, I studied the brain like a naturalist who happened upon a rare specimen. My mind wandered to brains I had seen —floating in jars at the museum, sketched in Dorland’s medical dictionary, propped on ice at the meat market in Portugal.
Blood. Tissue. That’s all.
But, not really. Emily Dickinson once wrote, “The brain is just the weight of gold.” It is the seat of the soul. It is the very essence of our being.
Suddenly uneasy, realizing that morbid fascination with the glassy organ eclipsed my own humanity, I stood up and moved away from the brain. Behind me laid a body, a crumpled pile, a deflated canvas duffle bag, cinched tight in the middle by a belt. In a flash, these parts reassembled in my mind. This was a man, I thought. A man with a tragic story. A man who suffered so terribly that he ended his own life.
This man was someone’s son, someone’s friend, someone’s neighbor--or the guy you saw sitting on the stoop every evening at 6 p.m. He was a person who, like all people, deserved a little dignity.
And, I was a young woman with a decision to make.
Later, when I looked at my still life photographs from that day, I realized it was all there in black and white. A frozen brain next to a vacant body, like a headstone marking a life gone wrong and the close of my short-lived newspaper career.
One corpse, two dead-ends.
Beth has published work in dozens of national publications, including Smithsonian and Natural History. She teaches writing at Rutgers University and Gotham Writers Workshops. She holds a bachelor’s of journalism from the University of Missouri and an MFA from Columbia University. Of her many honors, favorites include a year-long Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT and six-week trip to Antarctica with the National Science Foundation. She is currently working on a series of essays about farm life in New Jersey. Her favorite place to be is on the back of horse.