Life as a Stop Light

Samantha Levin

The phone’s ring bounced off marbled floors and echoed through extensive hallways.  A red banquet hall with velvet-cushioned chairs and a cherry wood table, a dark bedroom with an enormous flat screen television with the day’s Dow streaking across the screen, a white kitchen with gleaming countertops with no trace of a fingerprint filled with this deafening yet all too familiar noise.  A naked left hand reached to end the lonely ring.

            “Steve Draker speaking.”

            “Hey Steve, it’s Diane.  I was just letting you know that you can come by around twelve tomorrow to pick up the kids for the weekend.”

            “Oh fuck, it’s already my week for the kids?”

Confusion fills his mind as sweat stains his perfectly ironed button-down white shirt.  He desperately reaches to loosen the tie.

“I have to work this weekend Diane.  Can you keep them through the weekend and I’ll make it my business to pick them up on that Monday.”

            “You’ll make it your business? Isn’t that what has gotten us into this mess in the first place?”

As the naked hand dropped to hang up the receiver, a sole tear poured out of his tired eyes.  At the same moment, the tear dropped to the polished marble floor, a drop of water rained down from the ceiling upon his shiny, black hair.  The drains had not been cleaned in weeks due to the housekeeper’s need for a month off.  “Mr. Draker I have a family to spend time with,” resounded in Steve’s mind with a slight Jamaican accent.  “You don’t see this as important but I as hell do.  I not been home to my family in months because I here cleaning up after your filthy self.”

Steve released an agitated sigh as he sprinted up his spiral staircase.  He opened his bathroom door to find a two-inch layer of water covering his Persian tiled floor.  He screamed as he reached for his car keys and leaped out the door.  With great haste, he swung open the silver door to his brand new Mercedes Benz SL600 convertible and drove away from his estate, hell-bent on buying a bottle of Drano.  He didn’t play any music so that he could hear the sound of his V-12 engine roaring in the crisp autumn night.  The streets blazed with yellow and orange trees just beginning to shed their leaves.  The roaring engine did not dare to stop to take in the beauty of this annual sight where it is warm enough to drive with the windows down yet too cold to not wear a sweater.  No.  Steve kept pushing the pedal down; he kept racing forward.  The car kept a steady 100 mph down the road as his tie flapped across his shoulders.  Too caught up in the tragedy behind the need for Drano, the car sped off into the distance.

            A boy leaned over and kissed his girlfriend goodbye.  After an afternoon of finishing their homework side by side, the two are going to their respective homes.  His black North Face fleece covered his girlfriend’s shoulders.  Her icy hands wrapped around his khakis as she slipped them into his pockets.  He kissed her blonde hair that shimmered in the autumn’s sun setting light.

Suddenly the thought of his over-involved mother invaded the moment.  “Let me quiz you on your physics, Kyle” rang in his brain as he shut his eyes in aggravation.  Ever since the Family Fun Day at his private school when he fell off the tractor ride, Kyle’s mom has not taken her eyes off of him.  It was a normal occurrence for a child to be bumped off of the tractor, which kept a constant velocity of around 5 miles per hour.  But as Kyle gracefully tumbled out the back of the tractor, his mom yelped as if he had just been sucked out of a 747-airplane window and would be gone forever.  All the other kids cheered for Kyle as his Abercrombie hat went flying into the air for they too wanted to be bumped off of the tractor.  The cheering stopped when the children caught a glimpse of Kyle’s mom as she leaped off of the ride and went sprinting after her son.  The cheers turned into laughter, not at Kyle trying to get back on the tractor, but at his bizarre mother and her attempted rescue.  The constant calling of “momma’s boy” died down over the next couple of years as Kyle did nothing to cause his mother’s intensity to surface.

“Later Jess.  I gotta go, my mom’s gonna kill me.  I’m really not supposed to be out on a school night.”

            “It’s fine, I understand.”

He then raced over to his car and quickly floored it into reverse.  The family’s new puppy, Bundles, yelped as he ran out of the way avoiding his near death experience.  And with a simple wave of his hand, Kyle switched the car into drive and hurried home to his worried mother.  His pile of books toppled to the bottom of the car as he swerved around a turn.  The thoughts of Jess circulated throughout formulas for his physics test that he was sure to fail the next day.  Kyle knew perfectly well that his studying with Jess was not successful for there had been more lip action than calculator action.  Kyle glanced down at his speedometer to read 60 mph and quickly ran through the equation for final velocity and the way that Jess’s hair surrounded her shoulders, to remember why he was speeding.  Suddenly Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony sounded as Kyle read “Mom Calling” on his cell phone.

            “Hey Mom, what’s up?”

            “Kyle you get home right now.  It’s a school night mister and you have no right to be living the night life at the age of seventeen.”

Kyle could not help but smile at his mother’s exaggeration for his absence.

            “Alright Mom I’m on my way home.  I was just at Jess’s house.”

“Well I’m expecting you to walk through this door in the next five minutes.  Goodbye.”

Kyle placed his phone on the passenger seat as his thoughts switched gears to getting home in the next five minutes which was physically impossible due to his location: the opposite side of town.  Consequences for his actions and reasonable stories to tell his mother flooded his mind.  The memories of the tractor ride and the musical chanting of “momma’s boy” repeated over and over again.  Kyle sped around another bend causing his Physics textbook to slide over and tap his right foot.  Haste took over his body as he approached a red light.

            A pair of beaten up Nike’s, the right pressing the gas, the left flat upon the floor, began to feel numb.  These sneakers supported the black sweatpants that bunched around the ankles and waistband giving way to a protruding stomach pressed against the steering wheel.  An off white Hanes T-shirt held in this stomach and supported two dark arms.  These enormous arms lead straight down to two large, puffy hands that grasped hard around the cold, black steering wheel.  Pedro’s eyes sank deep into his head as he let out a sigh of boredom.  His cheeks puffed out as air wheezed from his lungs.  His enormous Pepperidge Farm truck exited the highway and steadily decelerated.  After three days of driving, Pedro had finally reached his final destination.  The thought of seeing his newborn baby girl caused a smile to appear on his exhausted face.  Every delivery is painful for Pedro must leave his wife to take care of a newborn

all by herself.  But his job is the only money coming into the house and is vital to the beginning of their family.  The truck approached a red light.

Pedro’s mind entered his fantasy world.  He often dreamed of a utopia, in which he is the president of a computer consulting company.  Pedro imagines a white house with the stone wall keeping intruders away with his baby girl in beautiful pink dresses with bows in her hair.  He envisions his wife watching her soap operas that were Tivo-ed from their television, as their cook prepares the evening’s meal.  The light turned green and Pedro drove on still imagining his world of happiness.  He visualizes his wife crawling into their feather bed with black satin sheets.  She wraps her arms around his slightly smaller stomach and squeezes.  In that moment, Pedro is happy.  As he reaches down to give his wife a kiss, a loud “POP!” sounded from the back tire of the truck.  Pedro agonizingly fell back into reality.  He flicked his blinker up and pulled over to the right of the road.

            Kyle turned his music up and belted his favorite Dave Matthew’s song.

            “There’s not a moment to lose in the game

Don’t let the troubles in your head

Steal too much time you’ll soon be dead

So play”

The lyrics carried over to a man standing outside of a Pepperidge Farm truck.  Kyle noticed him glance over with a look of disapproval.  The man looked frustrated so Kyle pressed the off button causing his blasting music to come to a sudden stop.  The man turned away rolling his eyes at Kyle making him well aware of his troubled state of mind.  “That makes two of us,” Kyle said to himself.  Kyle tapped his foot in anticipation to floor his car as soon as the light turned

green.  This light seemed to be lasting a lifetime.  Golden leaves fell across Kyle’s line of sight.  The leaves swayed in a distracting dance that begged for his attention with their sharp colors in contrast to the blackness of the asphalt of the hill in front of him.  But Kyle’s eyes did not dare lose sight of the stoplight.  They stared harder and harder as if they could magically change the light to green.

            The leaves did not pull his eyes away from the red light, but a loud roaring of an engine did.  Kyle’s head turned promptly towards the Pepperidge Farm truck.  He was confused.  The tan skinned man was still standing alongside his truck with his arms barely crossed around his large stomach.  The truck lay in stillness.  The roaring became louder and louder as Kyle’s heart raced faster and faster.  He took his hands off the steering wheel and foot off the brake.  He nudged the car into park and listened to the incredible noise.  Pedro heard the noise now, too.  He peered around the corner and started motioning his hand up and down, up and down.  Kyle’s muscles tensed as the opposite light changed to yellow.  His eyes widened as a speeding Mercedes screeched around the bend heading straight into the back of the parked truck.  The sound of metal crashing into metal forced Kyle to cover his ears and cover his head deep into his fleece.  Sparks flew causing the falling yellow, red and orange leaves to catch on fire.  Kyle watched Pedro race over to the convertible to find a man’s skull crushed into his windshield.  More sparks spurted out of the front of the truck as Pedro’s eyes discovered a bottle of Drano leaking all over the front seat.  He slowly backed away from the vehicle.  His eyes widened.  His heart pounded.  As feeling came back to Pedro’s legs, he sprinted away from the car and then hit the ground for cover.  Kyle’s eyes raced back towards the truck.  In the midst of a beautiful falling of golden leaves, a gigantic explosion reverberated.  Kyle witnessed the fiery flames of gold and orange meet the falling leaves in an autumnal kaleidoscope.  Pedro panted; his body rolled into a ball.  Kyle’s eyes were wider than ever, glazed over by a reflection of the fire.  The noise stopped.  The light turned green.