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The Fulton Street Incident
By
Carly Swanberg, Sep 04, 2008
It burns like tires screeching on pavement—that tar smell—I’m sure you know it well. It is a screeching halt
always with you. I finger the rubber that is left and hesitate at the missing clumps within. You will not look
back at the tracks you have left. I will try not to think twice about the burn marks and shredded tire hastily
swept to the side of the road. Passersby note but do not speak out loud: there has been an accident here.
I am a deep black—a thick deep Sharpie kind of black and I bleed through the pages of your well written story.
You do not know what it feels like to bleed through the pages. Crumpled in a wastebasket you do not know. You do
not suffocate without your cap on. And nevertheless I have opened my legs to your secret. The secret you have
left me with. These are the things I cannot and will not say about the secret you have given me:
At night I want to feel the marks. But no. It is with great torment that I cannot. Instead they hover above my
bed and they feed and grow and multiply off my silence. Every night there are more and more of them tormenting me
with their knowledge. They whisper to me in horrifying repetition: we saw you that night. we saw you that night.
we saw you that night.
At night I think of a bare white back gasping for air against worn down leather. I hear the sounds of sweat and
suction and strangulation. I am fighting at certain moments of the hour—other times I lie submissive. I lie
dormant. I cannot possibly think and when I do I think things like: I must let the bruises be physical only. I
must not ever comprehend what really happened in front of that television. I think of the blinking red alarm
clock screaming out in warning like a flare, like a mayday beacon in the darkness: 6:03 AM 6:03 AM 6:03 AM
I see the spilled red wine on the cheap IKEA table. I see the carpet I once admired you for having. I see the
unread novel collecting dust in the corner. They are all witnesses likely still there in the same
spot—unaffected. But I will not call them to the stand. I will not ask them to testify. I cannot watch any more
rubber fly off the screeching tires of the car you have long since driven in the other direction—past the
breakdown lane and off the left-hand exit.
Carly Swanberg just started focusing on writing again after a few years in the business world. She graduated
from the University of Vermont in 2005 with an English degree and Creative Writing concentration.
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