Matchbox Girls by Chrysoula Tzavelas Page B

breath. Then she got into the car and started it up, quickly, before the anxiety could resurface. Without medication, the world seemed like it was sustained by madness. Ordinary people got through life by believing in an illusion: that life was safe; that it , whatever it was, couldn’t happen to them. But to someone, somewhere, it did. It could be her or her loved ones. And there was nothing she could do about it. Oh, there were sensible precautions that anyone might take. But anybody who really thought about the randomness of the world would build a bunker, or else eventually go insane. And nobody seemed to want to hide in a bunker.
    They’d shot at her.
    And then they’d gone away.
    Marley shifted in her seat as she nudged the car into the beginnings of rush hour traffic. The kids were playing quietly with their dolls in the back seat, while Neath curled up tight in the cat carrier in the passenger seat footwell.
    Her gaze went back to the kids. She didn’t want to think about what else had happened at the park, but it kept intruding on her thoughts. That light, and the terrible expression on Lissa’s face. The voice, and the empty clothes after the light faded. Where had the women gone?
    She forced her thoughts away. Stuck in traffic wasn’t the time to try to understand what had happened, or ponder her brain’s health. Instead, she turned up the radio and listened for news of the wildfire, and for the traffic report.
    She listened to the list of road closures as the traffic crept forward. Then, as the DJ went on to talk about some celebrity news in much more detail than he'd given to the natural disaster, Marley noticed a white minivan two lanes over.
    Panic exploded through her. She couldn’t see the driver or the plates but it didn’t matter. It could be them, and here she was, trapped in traffic. She couldn’t go forward or backward; she couldn’t even change lanes.
    It took every bit of willpower she had to not unbuckle her seatbelt and fling herself out of the car.
    She hunched over her steering wheel as her breathing got faster and the traffic crept forward. She let the car coast forward a few yards. Her breath rasped and the panic slipped out of control again. What was she doing in a car? She was stuck in a tin can on an assembly line of death. They all were, and nobody could get out.
    The kaleidoscope vision returned. Instantly, the clogged freeway became a panorama of catastrophe. Every car she could see was wreathed in a dozen possible disasters of flame and twisted metal and half-glimpsed body parts. Even the loud radio seemed to merge into the hallucination, with guitars screaming like tortured souls.
    Marley sobbed, pressing her head against the steering wheel. Even with her eyes closed, the image of the worst pile-up imaginable wouldn’t leave her. So many people, so many possible bad choices. How did anybody survive?
    The blast of horns around her cut through her misery and she realized space had opened up before her. Squinting through her eyelashes, as if that could drive away the kaleidoscope vision, she let the car creep forward again. She stared at the road. She couldn’t get out, or go back, or get off the highway. All she could do was go forward. The kaleidoscope vision flickered off and on erratically. What was wrong with her?
    She was at the heart of the traffic jam now. A patrol car was on the shoulder, behind a long, sleek black sports car. The officer and the sports car driver were both standing between the two vehicles.
    And it was all wrong. The officer was rigid, while the other man was relaxed and confident. He had one hand on the officer’s shoulder, in a friendly sort of way, and he was speaking. There was a maelstrom of disaster wreathing the officer, but it wasn’t nearly as awful as his expression. The twisted horror on the officer's face was so vivid that it shocked Marley out of her panic.
    Then she saw the other man through her kaleidoscope vision, and a jolt of terror