Forty five miles per hour. Forty five miles per hour in a thirty miles per hour zone. Forty five miles per hour in a crowded Monday morning haze of children, mostly under twelve years old, screaming gleefully with laughter and optimism for the school day ahead. Blissful bodies empowered with high spirited cries of laughter and joyous conversation, saliva-spitting mouths spluttering old jokes and badly-worded opinions about the weekend's television. A dozen smile-laced faces illustrate spontaneous imaginations like out worldly thoughts bearing invisible paintbrushes and crafting a failed Picasso. An incoherent verbal flood.
Words rocket from the dozen mouths like a colossal wall missing bricks.
Vehicles roar past the youngsters, relentlessly aiding the December freeze with bellowing, almighty gusts. In the midst of their delight, they cower from the icy blasts that splinter their packaged faces by sinking into the warm hooded coats and thick woollen gloves which they wear, doing all they can to protect the only exposed part of their bodies from the harsh winter offering of glass shard air.
Bright yellow headlights battle the frozen mist and half succeed, illuminating a blurry high street immersed in a silver frost on one devilishly dark and cold morning, where the sun is evanescent, locked behind an unbreakable, ravaging grip, applied mercilessly by a destructive allied convergence of rabidly reckless winds and ice-bleached clouds, casting a withered shadow over civilisation like a malignant cancer or a flesh-rotting, blood-shedding plague.
The invigorating rays of the sun rupture like broken arrows against the formidable armour of the frosty street and shatter into quivering particles, admiring the cold's retort in a deathly invisible silence.
Melancholy weather elates exuberance, these children know no apathy.
Small feet take small steps. Light feet take light steps. Leathery shoes stamp into the surface leaving incomplete imprints in the thin layer of crumbling ice. Thick black heels bite into a glistening cake, shattering solidity and substance with polished splinters.
One child lowers himself, ducking out of the wind, but being captivated by the breath of the surface. His red laces unravelled, stiff in the ice. He swipes away the frost as if it were a choking dust.
The crowd of scuffling children moves on, trudging through the haunting mist. They leave behind the little one tying up his crimson shoe laces.
The laughter continues as the children cross the winter-foggy on a blood red light; one voice short.
With all across safely, the light changes. The winter-ridden road is enlightened by a deep green, reflecting like flat vegetation in a plentiful summer meadow upon the white.
Forty five miles per hour. Forty five miles per hour in a thirty miles per hour zone.
The one who is left behind staggers to his feet, at war with the wind. Hey, wait up! his thoughts cry, wait up! The boy begins to run, everything channelled on catching up with his friends, who are now distant shadows, swallowed up by the cold across the wintered street. Carefulness on the ice is thrown from his head. Crossing the road safely is-
Stunned silence engulfs the street. Sickening chills wrench watching hearts. A cataclysmic freeze in time occurs.
Jeremy Baker, age ten. Killed by not looking both ways.
Jeremy Baker, age ten. Killed by a speeding motorist.
Kill or be killed?
A.S. Kelly
© Copyright 2006
