What’s Your Emergency?
by Willow Nichols-Capra
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
When the police department called Violet early Sunday morning, she hoped for good news. Instead, she received word that the Coast Guard had retrieved her daughter’s body from the ocean, where her limbs had snagged on a jetty, keeping her from floating away, lost forever. The officer asked her to identify the body, Sarie’s body, and she could hardly bear the thought. She imagined the shell that was once her daughter, bloated and devoid of the girl that had inhabited her body. Violet’s husband, shrunken and empty, couldn’t stand to see their child in such a state, so she went.
A monochromatic haze blanketed her world, and she forgot to brake at a stop sign. A vehicle sounded its horn, and her car screeched to a stop, fishtailing on bald tires. She’d told her husband to replace the tires multiple times. He never listened. Maybe if she had gotten into an accident, he would have learned his lesson. Maybe he would be the one identifying a body.
Violet steered into a nearly empty parking lot and climbed from her car, which she left crooked in the closest spot to the morgue. Only as she closed the door did she notice the pink, beaded keychain that Sarie had made her dangling from the ignition. She had made it for her mother only a month prior in her kindergarten art class. The girl always came home with something new, each a little treasure for Violet. An electric current of anxiety shot from her heart to her fingertips. Once inside, she spoke to the receptionist, who offered her condolences—the words blurring together in Violet’s mind. Later, when she’d recall the moment, she would only remember the woman’s voice and the photo of the woman’s happy family on the desk.
It was her. Her little girl. Sarie lay on a table, a white sheet strewn across her small frame. Just five years old. Sterile air pumped through the vents, but Violet couldn’t breathe. The overhead lights oppressed her, glinting off the child’s temporary bed. The girl’s hair was matted, which happened when Sarie swam. At home, she could drip-dry the ocean off herself on the front porch, leaving wet footprints across the wood. Tiny feet slapping behind Violet as if she were a mother duck. In those moments, she supposed she was. She was Sarie’s protector, and she had failed. Failed to know that at some strange hour of the night, her daughter had crept from their home into the frenzied water of the ocean.
Violet almost expected her daughter to move. For a finger to twitch or her eyes to flutter open, confused about why she lay on such a cold table instead of in the comfort of her bed. Instead, the girl stayed still. Periwinkle pigmented her lips and surrounding skin. Sarie was ashen, small veins visible through the skin of her cheeks. Before entering the morgue, Violet had almost expected her daughter would still be wet with the salted water of Rock Harbor, but she was not. The only evidence of her tragic swim was the nauseating bloat of her skin. Though disgusted by the sight, Violet wondered how her daughter would feel now. She wanted to touch her, to reach out and stroke her cheek and see if it felt the way she remembered. She slid her hand forward before retracting it, unsure if she could truly fathom feeling her daughter’s skin so frigid. The chill of the room crept into Violet’s body, wrapping its tendrils around her joints and squeezing tight.
The fluorescent lighting emitted a constant buzz as Violet gazed upon her whole world, now dead on a table before her. The soft hum metamorphosed into an electrically charged swarm.
When Violet returned home, she turned off her car but didn’t move from her seat. She rubbed the beads of her keychain between her fingers. She half expected her daughter to swing open the front door, to run to her and stumble over joyful words about her day at school. The thought of entering a house without Sarie there to greet her filled her with a dread that stole the air from her lungs.
Inside was dark. Her husband hadn’t moved from the spot where he had planted himself before Violet left, taking root in his worn-down leather rocker. The television was off, yet his eyes remained fixed on the opal screen. When she entered the room with caution, he looked at her, the orange light of the falling sun casting a glow on his swollen, red eyes. Mucus leaked from his nose, unwiped.
“Did you have dinner?” she asked. Her voice was so soft she wasn’t sure it reached him.
“Why?”
The next few days were not what she expected, though she wasn’t sure what she’d anticipated. She’d never imagined something so horrible would burrow its way into her family, infecting them. After Sarie wore her favorite floral dress, bright as a sun-colored Crayola, and lay in a casket her family couldn’t afford, once they buried the girl so deep that the scavengers and weather couldn’t touch her, life returned to normal for all but Violet. Her mother and father had flown back home. Her husband begrudgingly returned to work. If he could do so, why did she feel as though she was dying? Every ticking of the clock hurt more, another second without her daughter. Another second where the girl’s heart was no longer beating.
When Violet failed to return to work, putting in her two weeks when her boss lost patience with her absence, she had hardly anything left. What she did possess was a fridge full of rotten food and takeout containers piled on top of Tupperware. She had a sink full of dirty dishes and a dishwasher filled with clean dinnerware from, well, whenever it was. She couldn’t remember the last time she cooked. Dinner now came in recycled plastic containers that took up too much space in the trash. The couple’s recycling was full of various liquor bottles. Beer infused with lime, vodka, tequila. Violet had forgotten to put the bin out two weeks in a row; their recycling now overflowed into a trash bag beside the bin. Her husband was less than thrilled.
She could feel his pity, burning into her body over his glasses as he sat in the chair facing her. She didn’t look to him but at the wall they had haphazardly painted just weeks before Sarie was born. Now, she identified patterns in the wall’s swirling shapes. Violet remembered the little, tender movement in her womb and how she’d press her hand to her belly. Now, she pressed her hand to her stomach, soft with reminders of Sarie, feeling an agony that would never leave her.
Violet spent hours on her phone, opening and closing apps, and when her eyes burned with strain, she’d put her phone down, only to return to it in two minutes’ time. She searched in the Appstore for sources of instant gratification. Gambling apps, shopping, and streaming services, the remote feeling miles away. Often, her phone would drop from her exhausted fingers, and the clatter of her heavy-duty case would jolt her awake just in time for another episode of Living Single. While searching for something new, she happened upon a blue and red app titled PD SCANNER, and as the app downloaded, she remembered being a girl, and a police scanner, and what she’d felt.
When she was young, she spent much of her time with the next-door neighbor, retired police officer Sandra Keye. Ms. Keye would invite her inside on sweltering summer afternoons, waving to Violet’s parents, who likely appreciated her help. Violet would sit on the floor that hadn’t been mopped in ages and plant herself directly next to Ms. Keye’s creaking rocking chair. At six years old, Violet didn’t know any of the children on her street. They were much older, and her mother always warned her of bullies. As eccentric as Ms. Keye’s was, Violet knew she had a friend in her. She’d watch the woman rock back and forth, eyes closed, comfortable in semi-silence save for the scanner’s constant static hum. Here and there, words and numbers she didn’t understand would sound through the white noise. When Sandra opened her eyes while the radio spoke, Violet knew the noise was vital.
Violet’s curiosity flourished with each visit. She familiarized herself with the police jargon mumbled over the radio. Ms. Keye was always impressed with how quickly the girl learned. During these visits, questions swirled in her mind, some too taboo to ask. Did anyone die in Rock Harbor? She didn’t hear much on the news. Sometimes she’d gaze up at Ms. Keye, the question on the tip of her tongue: what does a dead body look like? She figured awful things must happen. Even at her young age, she understood that tragedy was inescapable.
The PD SCANNER app finished downloading and prompted her to enter her zip code, which she did with fingers greased by the bag of chips that served as her breakfast, lunch, and dinner. PD SCANNER took a moment to load and then made a sudden, stentorian buzz with muffled voices enveloped in a static so thick they were nearly inaudible. The abrupt sound caused her to jump, almost dropping her phone into the snack bag beside her.
Once she recovered from the sudden racket, the jargon and codes came back to her, and a morbid nostalgia warmed her body. The couch welcomed her as she pressed her body back into the nook that now held her perfectly, caressing her and beckoning her to return to a fetal position. Violet placed the scanner by her ear and closed her eyes.
A teenage vandal spray painting an abandoned home. A house party that was “too loud” though it was only six in the evening. A suspected medical emergency: a man refused to be examined by first responders.
A car accident.
Violet felt a sudden burst of energy. A rush through her bloodstream. Suspected injuries.
Multi-vehicle crash. EMS, please respond.
Her heart hammered. She wondered if people had died and listened intently as she turned up the volume, leaning forward as if it would bring her closer to the scene. She could visualize it unfolding.
Two cars collided. Wrong-way driver. She held her thumb on the volume button until the joint in her finger began to ache. Blankets on the ground now, she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, and all through a little app.
The radio shifted between white noise and a report of drunken teens.
EMS is on the scene. One party unconscious.
“What are you—can you turn that down?” Violet’s husband stood in the doorway, squinting as if that would dull the shrill sounds coming from Violet’s phone.
“Sorry.” She silenced the scanner and locked her phone. “It’s a police scanner, actually.” She smiled as though she was five and discovering an interesting insect. He didn’t speak. Violet stared at the rug, frayed from their cat’s busy claws. “I was bored.”
“Okay, well. I picked up Chinese on the way home.” He offered the bag, but she only looked past it.
“Guess what happened?” Her excitement was palpable, and he twisted his mouth in a disgusted manner. He walked to the kitchen, out of sight. He didn’t reply to her question, and she followed behind. “A car accident!”
Her husband looked back at her, displeasure still fixed on his face. “What?”
“It was a wrong-way driver.”
“Well, are they okay?”
She thought for a moment, her heart tingling with an excitement she couldn’t explain. “I don’t know.”
Violet bought a new pair of headphones, a pale grey set that hugged her ears, warming them to an almost uncomfortable heat. Yet, she’d keep them on for hours until the announced “low battery.”
Her husband did not approve of her new hobby, and so, when he slept, she’d slide from their bed unnoticed, a mile between them. The floor lamp cast a warm glow over Violet as she folded her legs beneath her in her well-loved mustard-yellow chair.
In their waking life, her husband suggested that she attend a support group. Just once. It might help. And so, she tried to go, but ultimately, she never entered the building. She watched attendees file through the church doors, a haven for support groups of all kinds. Instead of joining them, she opened PD SCANNER. She waited for a long while, yet nothing interested her. When the support group’s attendees began to exit the church, Violet realized just how long she’d been waiting for something exciting to occur. She frowned as the group embraced one another and wiped away each other’s tears.
They got in their cars one by one, and the parking lot leaked vehicles, their headlights streaking the asphalt as they swung toward the exit. Once the lot was empty, a voice blared over the radio, tearing her from her reverie. Her knuckles turned white as she gripped the steering wheel, listening intently.
A jumper.
And nearby, too.
Her car swung out of the church’s parking lot. She felt electric, like the time Jared Cashet kissed her under the slide at recess when she was just a girl. Violet felt like smiling, so she did. Her foot pressed harder on the gas as she rolled down the window and let the breeze play with her hair.
Violet arrived on the scene, creeping as close to the action as her blanket of secrecy would allow. On the hill that overlooked the underpass, her voyeuristic elation began. She left her car parked on the sandy roadside. The aged, wooden split rail fence barely held her weight as she examined the spectacle before her.
Police gathered around an object in the road, lit by blue and red lights that flashed frantically. They interacted with it as if it were just another day. When the officers parted for a moment, she caught a glimpse that caused butterflies to swarm in her stomach. An excited buzz hummed in her ears as she moved closer. A sheet was laid over a body. A crumpled lump that once held a human within. Violet thought there would be more blood.
Traffic built up on the highway, headlights illuminating the scene more than before. Violet watched as EMTs lifted the body as carefully as its condition would allow. The officers directed traffic while the ambulance drove away with no lights or sirens.
Violet returned after her husband had retired to bed, still exhilarated. She wasn’t ready for sleep yet. Not while her head was so busy. Her phone was populated with unanswered messages her husband had sent hours prior. After swiping them away, Violet opened PD SCANNER once again. Before tonight, each time when the app inquired if she’d like to update her membership to Premium, she hadn’t thought she needed to. Listening to the day-to-day chatter was enough for her, and when something exciting happened, it felt like a reward for her patience and attentiveness. Now, she craved the next tragedy.
She played out the scene over and over. The flashing lights. The traffic. How when they’d peeled the body from the roadway, there had been a blotch of viscous liquid that the EMTs splashed water from drinking bottles and soap upon, leaving behind pink suds and not washing away much of anything. For a brief flicker of time, Violet wondered if the officers did the same after the ambulance drove away with the shell of her daughter inside. A flame ignited in her throat, a dry, suffocating feeling that left as soon as it arrived.
Tonight, the app prompted her once again. Premium features! Expand your radius! Just $14.99 a month!
With no hesitation, she subscribed to the upgraded version of the app, and once her purchase processed, the map on the screen doubled in size. She couldn’t hold back her smile. Above her, creaking floorboards under her husband’s weight followed his path to the stairs.
“Violet?” Sleep blanketed his voice.
“Hey, sorry, I know it’s late.”
“Did you just get home?” He began to close the gap between them as he descended the stairs with leaden feet.
“Yeah, I made a friend at the meeting. We got drinks down the street.” The words curled from her mouth with sour dishonesty.
“Honey, that’s great,” he said with a tone of relief. He embraced her. Violet felt proud of herself for getting better, and that’s all he wanted for her, wasn’t it?
He kissed her, and then she gathered she didn’t taste of alcohol.
The following days on PD SCANNER PREMIUM were uneventful, not worth dragging herself to her car and driving two towns over for a pedestrian accident. No serious injuries. A fender bender. Driver unscathed. A domestic dispute. Not what she craved.
On a day that she and her husband had meant to spend together but instead missed drifting in their own dark corners of their home, she sat in the sunroom armed with her headphones and a fully charged phone. Violet closed her eyes and listened, and as time passed, she began to fade in and out, the lulls of gentle static beckoning her to sleep.
Her heart pounded as an authoritative voice awakened her. A suspected drunk driver accelerated into a tree. Violet sat up, unsure of how long she had been asleep. She felt warm, her cheeks burned, and a dull pain spread across her lower back. She stumbled through the room with tingling legs, trying to right herself before the scene was no longer.
Her husband looked at her as she dragged herself into the living room to the door that led to the garage. She avoided eye contact as she grasped for her keys, the pink keychain a stark contrast to her husband’s spartan key ring. He said nothing, and in a moment’s time, Violet was in her car headed west on Carlton.
When she arrived near the scene, she pulled her car onto the road’s shoulder, angling the vehicle behind lush flora that crawled away from the wooded area. She peeked behind the plants. Frantic EMTs assessed the scene before them. Violet walked far into the woods, planting herself behind the chaos. On her stomach, taking uncomfortable breaths, she removed her phone from her pocket and opened the camera. She zoomed in as far as her outdated phone would allow. The image was grainy and shook from her excited grip. She felt frustration build in her chest.
All she wanted was to see how bad it was. Violet took deep, frantic huffs of air. The landscape offered little room for her to move closer, but she had to. Being so far was an itch she couldn’t scratch. Leaves crunched as she crawled nearer on her hands and knees, stopping periodically to see if anyone glanced in her direction.
Now, the carnage was in clear view. Slumped over the steering wheel, one arm slack, a man lay motionless. Violet’s heart fluttered, and she had a fleeting, worrisome thought that the man would revive and take a heaving breath, making her trip pointless. Blood seeped from the man’s face. As she’d driven to the accident, she’d imagined the scene would be like a Hollywood film: a man bleeding from the head yet still wearing a peaceful expression as smoke plumed from under the car’s crumpled hood.
Instead, the man before her had become one with the steering wheel. His head was turned toward Violet, his one remaining eye staring at her. The wheel had dented the socket where his eye once lived—the other, empty of what was formerly a man. A man with an entire life, gone in a moment. She figured he had a partner, maybe kids too. Though immersed in the horror, she felt giddy. Like Christmas morning, she received something she had waited for each and every day.
That night, when she finally lay in bed, she thought of the man’s family and how she’d felt less alone. And much to her husband’s surprise, they made love for the first time since their daughter’s death.
As time went on, Violet’s dishonesty grew. Of course, she loved her support group. It was helping so much! Instead, she chased her newfound thrill. All of the scenes she had attended since the crash were gruesome, though not fatal, much to her dismay. She drove town to town, county to county, parking her car in hidden locations and witnessing strangers’ lives change forever.
She’d figured there must have been amputations, perhaps TBIs, or more interestingly, comas. Maybe some died without her knowledge. The fact that she’d never know bothered her like an incessant buzzing mosquito that could not be swatted away.
On a particularly slow night, Violet drove on the winding back roads that had become a comfort to her. Gliding over hills and leaning with the road’s fluidity, she felt at ease. She didn’t have to speak to neighbors, didn’t have to sit in silence in her own home, remembering a time when she once heard frenzied, jovial giggles coming from her daughter’s bedroom. Violet tried to remember her face, but Sarie had begun to blur in her mind.
Her clouded headlights led the way, and the trees on the side of the road were lit to reveal their dying leaves. At an intersection, she slowed to a stop as a Jeep, the first car she’d seen on her drive, swung in front of her, tires squealing and echoing in the otherwise quiet night. Violet gave the driver space as they swerved from one side of the road to the other, jerking back to the middle when they realized they had drifted too far. The Jeep carried on with its drunken trajectory, and Violet followed.
Her knuckles greyed under her tight grip on the steering wheel while her palms sweated. She hoped eventually, the winding road would deceive the driver, sending them into the woods, or if she were lucky, another car. After a moment’s thought, Violet turned on her high beams.
The two cars reached the last peaceful stretch of road before it merged into the center of town. The Jeep began to accelerate, and she pressed her foot on the gas. As the Jeep swerved again, Violet heard a thud. The Jeep slammed on its breaks, tires squealing, causing Violet to do the same, her body almost connecting with her steering wheel.
Violet’s eyes scanned the side of the road, landing on the culprit of the racket. A mangled bicycle, its back wheel bent towards the bike’s center. Just beside the bicycle, a body. Violet exited her car without hesitation. As she rushed toward the crumpled body on the side of the road that resembled a doll played with too roughly, the Jeep sped away.
As she rushed toward them, she could see their chest rise and fall. Instead of healthy, deep breaths, their lungs popped and crackled as they’d begun to fill with blood, accompanied by a wheezing gasp.
Violet’s eyes met those of the man on the ground. The boy. He was perhaps ten years old, maybe twelve. He’d experienced the excitement of leaving elementary school behind. He’d probably graduated from a small cubicle that held his jackets, to an entire locker. She imagined it decorated with pictures of his family and friends. Sarie never experienced that. Sarie was only ever able to stuff her winter coats in her cubby, her name tag above it sporting a backwards “S.”
Sarie, who never learned how to ride a bike.
Sarie, who still played pretend.
Her daughter was gone, but the boy before her still breathed.
His face was skinned from the collision with the sand and gravel of the roadside. His left eye was in the early stages of swelling shut; the other had burst a blood vessel. His crimson eye looked at Violet, her headlights illuminating the scene in a soft, orange glow. With his arm bent in a way it shouldn’t be, he reached for her. Blood dripped from the side of his mouth, and when he coughed, it splattered on the ground before him.
“Please,” the boy said, barely above a whisper. Violet crouched beside him.
Violet smiled.
He looked relieved.
He looked as though he believed he would live as he lay there on Massasoit Road.
She continued to smile, lips curling in a devious grin.
The boy tried to speak again. His eyes fluttered, his smile went slack, revealing a cracked front tooth from his violent landing. Violet leaned close to his face.
He’d lived long enough.
She thought of the boy’s mother. About how a police officer would arrive at her door later that night, giving the family’s door a weary knock. She imagined how his mother would collapse, how her belly would feel leaden as she fell to the ground in an anguish that very few knew.
The boy’s chest rose and fell in panicked jerks. A sickly, wet rattle left his throat. His eyelids twitched.
Open and shut. Open and shut.
Until they remained closed.
Violet sat for a long while. The boy was breathless now, his soul having escaped his body. After what felt like hours of observation, she slid into her car and drove home.
Her husband slept as she changed out of her clothes, splattered with blotches of blood on the sleeves and knees of her outfit. With dirty hands and the remaining grains of sand that clung to her socks, she slid into bed. Violet embraced her husband, and he stirred. For the first time in a long while, she felt peaceful. He turned to her.
“How was your day?” he asked, his voice clouded with sleep.
“Fantastic.”