Everyday Canvas

Wrong Turn

Prompt: You take a wrong turn when driving through a foreign country. What happens next?

=============

In real life, in a foreign country, I avoid driving like the plague. The only place I drove just a little bit was Canada. Luckily, we had friends in most of the other lands that we visited who took us around. In the other places without friends, my husband took on the driving.

You know what can happen when you take a wrong turn even in your own country. On 28 June, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand's driver, Leopold Loyka, made a wrong turn, and a hundred million people died as its result. As Taylor Smith says, “Flashing lights and we, took a wrong turn and we. Fell down the rabbit hole.”

But, just to go along with the prompt, I’ll make up an imaginary story.

Wrong Turn

Panic stricken, I realized I had taken the wrong turn after the acceleration slammed me cruelly to the metal floor. Something broke inside my mouth, possible a tooth, and wet stuff ran from my mouth to my chin. I wiped it off with the back of my hand and stood up to take the driver’s seat again.

The controls indicated that I was steering the spaceship inside the anti-matter. I regretted my life now, if only for a split second. I regretted not becoming a romance-novel-reading, stay-at-home mother who went bowling with her team in a league, instead of trying to maneuver this clumsy vehicle for the cockamamie job of space exploration.

It was total darkness, outside. There were no swarms of any kind and no population density. Everything was crude, even I and the crew with our conditionings, idiosyncrasies, and biases. Were we to become emigrants inside the anti-matter? I wished I could find my way back, but I knew that once you’re inside the anti-matter, you become anti-matter.

It was easy to fly into a rage and I did just that. Then I wondered how I could do so if I had become anti-matter. How could that be possible? Maybe becoming anti-matter took its time; after all, ours was a specially-built ship, which we could drive on land, sail both on and under liquids, or fly through most anything.

How awful that I suddenly realized a fact. The fact that becoming anti-matter really took its sweet time. On the intercom, I called my crew in the next compartment. No answer.

Some things never changed. Wrong leaders always brought disaster. Driving inside a space under the wrong captain brought the end to things. Wrong captain like me. Sure enough, I couldn’t feel the blood or the broken tooth inside my mouth. This was the last thing I learned then--that death and anti-matter are the same thing, and they signal the end of all pain.