Flat Tyre

Ed was spewing. He was fuming. He couldn’t believe it. He’d worked hard for this car. Bit by bit managing to save a grand working behind the cash register at Coles at nights after uni. Just so he could buy this little white corolla so he could drive himself out of Hoppers Crossing on weekends and now the bloody cunt of a car has fucking flat tyre. Worst of all, he is in the middle of nowhere somewhere between Melbourne and Swan Hill on the last boring stretch of straight nothing before you get to the town.

Fortunately he’d been able to keep control of the vehicle and now he stood parked by the side of the road. He flicked the hazards on. His mom had told him to drive carefully and, honestly, he had. He hadn’t even been speeding. Dad would be wondering where he was. He’d been supposed to arrive at his dad’s in Swan Hill an hour or so ago, but Ed just had not been able to leave bed this morning after the night before. Or actually the afternoon, evening, and night before and this early morning. He’d come home at 8am which’d been the time he’d been supposed to have left, but instead he’d passed out for a while. When he woke it was an hour later. It’d felt like a milli-second. He’d been glad then that he’d packed his bag the morning before, only a couple of hours before he’d gone of the rails into la-la-land, as he’d like to call it. It’d started with an early beer and had eventually ended with rails of speed in the middle of the night at some chick’s house whom he hardly knew but she was cool and they’d talked and really connected. He hadn’t even wanted to fuck her. That surprised him. He could not remember one thing they’d talked about.

But now he stood by the side of the road looking at his corolla’s back tyre on the passenger side which was a flat as a pancake and he cursed the asshole that’d sold him the machine not even a week ago. He’d promised Ed this ‘little beauty runs like a well-lubricated blow-up doll on Christmas eve’ whatever that meant. It’d sounded funny to Ed so he bought the car without checking it properly. From the trunk he first took his bag and then the carpet on the bottom of it to reveal the triplex cover for the spare tyre and the gear to put it on. At least, he hoped it was there, because that was one of the things he’d forgotten to check when he’d bought the car.

He takes the piece of triplex of the spare-compartment. He looks into it. He turns away from the car and doubles over with his hand on his knees and pukes his little heart out. Retch after retch fill his entire being until he is completely empty. When he regains control of his stomach he looks carefully into the trunk again. Where the spare tyre should be lays instead a severed head face down. Grey wispy hair is matted to the back of the skull and if the smell is anything to go by it has been separated from its body a while ago.

The head swivels around and says ‘Hi Eddie.’ Ed looks at the thing, into the surprisingly live grey-blue eyes in the grey-brown rotted sockets. ‘Don’t you recognise me you little cocksucker?’ Ed can’t believe it. There is only one person who used to call him that. ‘Grandma?’ He says. ‘What is going on?’ ‘I’m here to teach you a lesson you little shit. I’m here to tell you that your wicked ways need to change. That you can’t sit up all night with floozies, racking up lines of God-knows-what and talk the worst shit all night, and expect to see the light at the end of the tunnel.’ Ed jumps back as his grandmother’s head starts to levitate out of the trunk, now eye-to-eye with Ed. Under her her favourite purple flowered muumuu materialises. Her face is starting to look a little less rotten. ‘What happened to you Eddie? You used to be a good kid. We spent a lot of time together you and I on accord of your dad being put away half the time and your mom working her arse off at the all-night chemist. You were a delight then. Now you do all those drugs and drink like a fish. You sleep around. What happened to that nice girl you were seeing?’ Ed’s face collapses into self-pity, ‘Things were tough without you grammie. I was always alone. My dad didn’t care. My mom didn’t care. I grew up to be this after you died. I’m not to blame.’ An invisible hand slaps his cheek and an evil wind blows around him as grandma grows and grows, towering over him and she thunders ‘Excuses, excuses! When I was your age I’d already given birth to two children , one died in labour, the other after two weeks. I was 17. Nothing in my life ever came for free, but pain. Travelling from Swan Hill to Melbourne? It never happened. I didn’t see Melbourne till I was 25 and I had to vouch for your grandfather in court.’ Another slap land on his other cheek. ‘Get you act together boy. You don’t know pain. Loss and despair are constants. Don’t hold on to them. Don’t try and escape them. Hold on to the tiny lights in your life. Don’t try and drown the pain. Focus on the good, not the bad.’ Grandma has now shrunk back to her normal diminutive size again and the wind has stopped. With grizzly lips she kisses Ed on the lips and he feels a dark weight he never before realised he was carrying fall of him.

‘Mate? Hey mate? .... Excuse me sir!’ Ed comes to bent over into the trunk. ‘Are you alright sir?’ Ed rights himself and turns around seeing that the voice belongs to a cop. ‘Yes, I’m ok,’ Ed stammers, ‘I was just getting my spare. I’ve got a flat.’ He tries to sound offhand. The cop looks at him and walks around the car. ‘Which tyre?’ the cop asks. ‘They all look fine to me.’

Copyright Joran C.A. Monteiro 2009