Hit by a Truck

"I think we should end this,"

Pierre stopped running. He was tired, so tired that even pretending to care seemed like a chore to him.

And now, as he just stood there, the rain violently spitting onto him, he noticed that he did not give a tinkerer's damn about anything that was happening in his life at all.

"It's all fake anyways," he added.

Isabelle collapsed in her step for a moment; she was shaking. Pierre couldn't tell if it was because he had finally struck a chord or because her cold, wet clothes, which stuck to her like cellophane, were slowly chilling her bones.

Should he offer her his coat? Do people even do things like that nowadays? Would it seem weird if he did something like that in this moment?

Pierre turned his face to the sky to better observe the raindrops falling onto Isabelle. He could see them rolling off her long, fiery red hair like pebbles, crawling down her hunched back, and seeping into her wet summer coat until they eventually dropped onto the floor, where they burst into obscurity in a choir of dripping background noise.

"Rain is a funny thing," he thought. "When it falls as hard as today, I wonder: Could it give me a free back massage?”

His daydreaming was violently interrupted by Isabelle. Her wet hair whipped around like a basket of snakes, almost striking Pierre as she spun towards him.

"Are you serious right now?" she asked, her voice audibly shaking in rage.

"Huh? I mean, sure."

"You are an insufferable asshole, Pierre! It's like your heart is made of stone!"

"Isabelle, I…"

She pushed him away forcefully, her head turned away to hide her tears. Pierre, who was caught off guard, stumbled backward. He tried to catch himself. He flung his arms around helplessly and swung his hips back and forth to regain his balance, but the ground was just too slippery for him to find any footing.

He opened his mouth to call for help.

However, he could only fall.

As the sky above rushed past him, raindrops kept dancing and bursting on his face. He could hear stars and see noise spinning around him. His entire body felt wet and heavy; Pierre would not move even if he wanted to.

"My eyes hurt."

Pierre put his hand on his face. He waited in darkness for the stars to stop singing.

"What is this smell? It smells like a basement in summer. Or wet, expired coffee beans? No, that can’t be… This smell... Is it... dirt? No, it smells too much like a calcified bathroom! This is... Mud!"

He slowly opened his eyes and looked around. He was lying at the bottom of the pits the construction workers had dug out; his hand, brown and slippery and covered in mud.

But it did not matter.

The stars were singing again. Actually, they were screaming his name this time around.

"Pierre..."

"What an obnoxious voice," he thought. "It kind of reminds me of…"

"Pierre, watch out!" Isabelle's panicked voice finally reached him.

"Watch out? Watch out for what?"

Before Pierre could finish his thought, a tidal wave of mud slammed across his face and knocked the breath out of him. He gasped for air, but there was none left.

Mud quickly rushed down his tongue, into his lungs and nose. It poured onto his eyes and stole his vision.

"I can't breathe."

In a panic he thrashed his arms and legs around, but more and more mud kept flowing over. It felt like he was trying to punch through a wall of solid gelatin.

"I can't move."

He thought he could hear Isabelle shouting his name.

And the rest was silence.