RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

Clown Trapped in Burning Car

This evening while cleaning out email, I ran across something very strange. It took me a minute to remember, but then I realized it was the first in a series of self assigned writing assignments. In these assignments, I’d think up a topic in a second and write a page about it. This masterpiece was created a week before I started my current job. Its title and its concept: Clown Trapped in A Burning Car:

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It happened in a flash. Literally a flash, as the trucks headlights swung across 2 lanes of traffic and into my path. In the blinding brilliance of halogen beams cutting through the windshield like some wild spirit, I saw the certainty of death in the eyes of that truck driver. I also saw in that split second - a suspension of belief - as he realized his truck was hurtling towards a clown car.

I was the clown. Usually hired for jobs at kid’s birthdays and traveling carnivals, I was on my way home from a gig at one hell of a strange bachelorette party. In what turned out to be a cataclysmic error, I decided to take the local route. Traffic was too thick and I had a little too much to drink to drive on the Garden State Parkway. That shitty meth deprived driver whose eyes I met in that instant, took the turn too fast and overcompensated after he cut into the shoulder. Now there I was, with a second, maybe 2 to prepare for the inexorable impact.

People say the seconds stretch out long enough for your entire life to flash before your eyes, and yes they do. But what they never tell you is that even in that space of mysteriously convex time, there aren’t enough real moments in which to feel fear. Following instinct and pulsing with adrenaline, I jarred the steering wheel so hard to the right I thought I’d rip it out of the dashboard. The car cut hard enough into the blind darkness of the New Jersey countryside, to send my big red nose flying right off my face.

The impact, which came at the rear driver’s side of my tiny Corolla sent the car end over end into the cool Jersey air. I remember a moment of peculiar silence between the time I left the ground and the time the roof hit the first of a series of pine trees. A giant shoe, sent flying from its place on the passenger seat smacked me in the face, temporarily blinding me. Then came impact… and the rolling.

Tumbling was more like it, as glass and metal flew without mercy through the cabin of my little Toyota, cutting my face hands and fluffy, oversize clothing. The passenger side roof collapsed, hemming me into a rapidly narrowing cocoon of gnarled steel. A hissing and loud pop accompanied the car’s grinding halt. A few seconds after the sinister pop, the sweet and smell of an electric fire filled the car. I was pinned upside-down, white make-up stinging my eyes and choking on the sharp and putrid smoke.

I found both arms trapped, pinned between the former elements of my vehicle. I felt the fire spreading, not in my senses, but in my minds eye. I saw it catching a dab of engine oil and spreading through the interior components on its unstoppable march to the gas tank. In a slow, burning internal panic, I tore free my left arm and undid my seat belt. By some miracle, it unlatched and let me fall the a few inches to the roof. A wisp of flame caught the polyester of the clown suit…

And that’s as far as I got.