Safety Glass
When she opened her eyes again, it was to dazzling yellow light. Heat burned through her shoulder, spread into her upper arm and all down her hip, buttock and thigh. Her leg below the knee still felt frozen.
Cramp gripped the muscles at the back of her neck. The glass held her head, forced to the left, as if she’d been caught glancing back over her shoulder. Maybe she had. Her mouth was filled with glue. She licked at the corners with a slug’s tongue. Her weight was in her thighs, butted against the glass. She eased it on to her feet again and whimpered at the bones grinding inside her knees.
She rotated her eyes. Through the glass, the grass was weedy and straggling. It should’ve been cut but there’d been rain – day after day of it. Rainclouds even now crossed the sun – bulky, water-brimmed clouds. Their shadows followed the path the heat had taken across her body, leaving her chilled again with each one’s clumsy progress.
How long before the sun set behind the buildings? She could guess but it was too much effort. No point in wondering how she’d got stuck like this either.
She eased her neck, sliding her skull up and then down, still yanked to the left, sliding the hard bones where her forehead met hairline up and down against the glass. Vapour smeared as she breathed.
If she slept again, it might be over. That could happen. She shut her eyes. Each opening brought, again, the grass there, overlong and tumbled, a fugue of grey and yellow light behind it, slanting as the sun conceded.
Her breath condensed. The glass pressed hard and damp through her sleeve on the point of her shoulder. It was a thin cotton sleeve with no warmth in it. Her glute muscle burned. Her right thigh ached, too long held in position, turned in to the left, her foot twisted as if she was a hieroglyph scratched for millennia on the wall of a pyramid. She licked her lips and breathed through her open mouth, hair streaking the window. If she tilted her head back and rolled her eyes clockwise, eleven, twelve, one o’clock, she could see the blonde strands of hair netting mist and microscopic dust particles on the glass.
How had she allowed herself to be trapped? She circled her left arm, angled her face and touched fingertips to lip. If she could sleep.
Two houses had windows lit though there were no cars in the driveway. It was a miserly light to dupe burglars into thinking there were families inside: children eating toast and honey while mum sautéed beef and shallots, vine-grown tomatoes and a pot of basil in easy reach.
Pinot Noir or Sauvignon. Easy reach.
A sleep. A noise. Awake.
Chill, transmitting through the plate and flimsy cotton blouse. Tedium. If she could revolve her head to the right to watch for cars or remember something to distract herself with … but her head was gripped, clamped to the left.
A hum. A racetrack. A sleep.
She woke. Her bladder had ballooned upwards in the bucket of her pelvis and out against the girdle of glass. All the fluids in her body had funnelled into the lowest cavity. She couldn’t curve her hand to contain it – too little room, her hipbones squashed against the glass in front and what held her in place behind. When had she last drunk? Her lips were dry, pink skin splitting.
Her bladder ballooned. With realisation came a panicked urge to break from the fixed position. She searched downwards with her toes for something firm to push against; metal. A metal ledge, half a foot wide. She pressed against it with the toes of both feet, sucking in her bladder and lifting herself up in the narrow void.
If this was sleep, she had to wake. If she was awake, she had to … what? She rocked, pushing her chest flat on the glass and arching her back, rolling frustration out and down her body, all the way to the metal ledge below her feet but her bladder was still bursting. Heat stung the corners of her eyes.
Her lungs bellowed; she drove her jaw down. Only air exited, fuzzing the glass and obscuring the grass even more than the gathering dark. Urine flowered around her pubic mound, seeped through the fibre of her trouser legs. Hot urine scorched cloth and skin on the inner surface of her thighs. Drum-beat on her feet. Urine stench filled the narrow prison.
She made herself numb. How could she do anything else? Glazed, screwing her eyes to the front to see nothing on the other side of the window. No one passing but strangers. And once, when the urine had cooled and the sun had gone and an odd, old winter-damp chilled her, the express rumbled over the bridge, yellow light blurring.
She must have slept again. Woke shivering to the sound of beeping and a slamming door. Behind her, over her shoulders, brilliant light. People.
There was a memory: a dream, maybe. Yellow light on a train; an intercity. Her head against the safety glass and towns and country going by through the window. A laptop hum. A stiletto lost under the table. A spilled plastic wineglass, rolling. Disapproval in a business suit on the other side of the table. Grigio, bought at the station, she’d meant to keep.
Light behind; night in front. The express rumbling over the bridge.
Reflected, blue light and a woman mouthing. Make-up and hair-dye.
A business suit. Announcement.
Her cheek chilled against the steamed-up vapour. She knocked her knuckles against the glass. How could the woman not see?
The woman stood. Leaned in.
Disappeared when she closed her lids.
Carol McKay‘s short stories and poems have appeared in Gutter, Chapman, Mslexia and others as well as anthologies by Cargo, Birlinn and Luath Press. In 2010, she was awarded the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. She has an MLitt from Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities and teaches creative writing through The Open University. Her website is carolmckay.co.uk.
