A sticky, peeling sound against the linoleum I'd vaguely noticed when I first walked inside.
I froze for a few seconds before I used bare toes to slide it off my foot.
Crouching down, my hand hovering over the floor, I found the shoe and ran my fingertips along the sole. The tread, usually rough and gritty with city dirt, was filled with something tacky. It wasn't gum. Gum was lumpy. This was something that coated the entire bottom of my shoe.
I brought my fingers to my nose.
The smell hit me instantly. The same thing I'd smelled in the alley, only this time, without the other smells from the city mixed with it, I knew exactly what it was.
Blood.
Copper pennies and salt. That specific, unmistakable iron-tang that separated it from any other smell.
I recoiled, dropping my shoe and scrambling backward until my back hit the cabinets. My heart hammered a frantic rhythm against my ribs, and my breath came in short, sharp gasps that I couldn't control.
It wasn't grease in the alley outside of my job. It was blood. And a lot of it, to coat the bottom of my sneaker like that and make it all the way back to my apartment. Enough to still be tacky after the walk home. Enough to still carry that smell.
The metallic scent acted like a tripwire in my brain, bypassing logic and detonating a memory I had spent two years trying to bury behind the walls in my mind…
Flashes of light.Screeching tires. The horrifying crunch of metal folding like paper—a sound I still heard sometimes in the middle of the night. The smell of radiator fluid and wet earth and…blood.
Then the silence. The absolute, suffocating silence after impact, broken only by my own ragged breathing.
"Daddy?"
Nothing but the ticking of the cooling engine.
I try to open my eyes. I blink, expecting the stars, the headlights, the moon. Anything. Even the dashboard lights would be something. Just a sliver of illumination to prove the world I know still exists.
But there's only darkness. A heavy, wool-blanket of darkness pressed against my face. Against my eyes. Smothering everything.
The panic is immediate. My hands fly to my face, wet with something I can't comprehend, pawing at my eyes like I can wipe the darkness away. Like it's something external that can be removed.
It's not.
"Daddy, I can't see. Daddy?"
My voice is small. Childlike. I haven't sounded like that since I was eight years old and afraid of thunderstorms.
I reach out with shaking fingers. My hand finds his arm. It's warm and wet, like my face. Too wet. And it's spreading, soaking through his sleeve, coating my palm. I shake him, desperate for a response, for movement, for anything. My fingers slide down to his wrist, searching for a pulse I can't find?—
"No,"I gasped, the word tearing out of my throat in the quiet kitchen.
The present slammed back into me like a second collision. I wasn't in the car. I was in my apartment sitting in the kitchen. I was okay. I was home. I was safe.
I scrambled up, rushing to the sink, clipping my hip on the drawer handle hard enough that pain bloomed bright and sharp. Turning the faucet on full blast, I shoved my hands under the scalding water. It burned me, but I didn't fucking care. I scrubbed the blood from my fingers until my skin turned raw,breathing hard through my nose and fighting back the bile rising in my throat.
I wasn't that girl anymore. I wasn't the twenty-four-year-old screaming in the wreckage, clawing at her own face, covered in her father's blood. I was Raven Oakley. And I was a survivor.
I had to be.
Finding my shoe, I grabbed it off the floor, thrusting the sole under the stream of water, and scrubbed it violently with the dish brush. The water swirling down the drain would be pink. I knew this, even if I couldn't see it. In my mind's eye, where I could still see colors, I watched it, crimson swirling into the clear water.
Get it off. Get it off.
I scrubbed until the tackiness was gone, until the smell was drowned out by lemon dish soap.
When it was finally clean, I left the shoe drying in the sink, put the other one in its spot by the door, and retreated to the living room, curling up on the sofa. Pulling my knees to my chest, I wrapped my arms around them.
