By Holly Day
It’s strange the things that stick with you forever, things that seem minor at the time but never leave you. For example, when I was 15, my parents were driving us home from a fourth of July fireworks show, and on the way home, we saw a kid who had been decapitated in a motorcycle accident lying by the side of the road. I don’t know anything else about the accident except that it had just happened, and the carful of teenagers who had hit the kid on his motorcycle were standing by their car, their faces white and terrified, waiting for the police to come. There was no escape—it was 4th of July, and traffic was backed up end-to-end, regardless of having an accident to distract them.
This image, this night, is something that’s stuck with me for over 30 years. I keep writing about it. It keeps coming back up in my dreams. I have no personal attachment to anyone in the story, but it’s found a home in my head, apparently forever.
Because of this one night, I’ve had a valid story to tell my children when they’ve gone out after dark to ride their bikes around, or now that my oldest is an adult who rides his motorcycle to work, I tell them about the boy lying by the side of the road, arms spread, head removed so neatly that there was just jacket and then nothing, just a headless body spread-eagled in the road. The traffic was so slow that we had to creep past the whole scene, like we were in one of those little cars on a track in a haunted house ride at the fair. I see it all the time, I still don’t know who it was.
Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in The NoSleep podcast, Talking River, and New Plains Review, and her published books include Music Theory for Dummies and Music Composition for Dummies. She currently teaches classes at The Loft Literary Center in Minnesota, Hugo House in Washington, and the Indiana Writers Center.