#THE BEHIND THE BEYOND FULL#

After the fall of the Communist regime, there was an old cinema in Bucharest where he used to go and watch John Ford movies in English. He told her that he had once spent a year teaching in Bucharest, and he had now come back to see some of the places where he had been. As though it were up to him to keep the conversation going while she lay there saying nothing. She was unable to answer his questions, so he began to tell her something about himself, to pass the time.

Below, in the valley, a siren could be heard at that point, but it seemed to be going further away, to some other accident elsewhere. He placed the phone back into her hand and stood over her, letting her know that the emergency services would soon be there. He got no answer and left a message, telling Alex there had been an accident. A man named Alex, whose face came up in a small bubble. She must have tried to speed-dial for help, he thought, but had instead managed to switch on the flashlight. There was a paper cup on the ceiling, the contents all over the dashboard. The interior of the car smelled of coffee. He turned the car off but then decided to leave the tail lights on, so the rescue services would find them more easily if it got dark. The radio was on, the real world still keeping in touch. There were no other occupants in the car.

Her elbows and knees were dusty with soil. There were no signs of injury, no marks on her body as far as he could see. Her eyes were open, but she was no longer breathing.

It took him a while to get down to the site of the crash. He explained roughly where he was, but his directions were vague-out in the mountains, he had come through a beech forest, he could hear the sound of a motorbike. He phoned the hotel in the small town where he was staying and asked the desk clerk to send the emergency services. He called out to her, but there was no response. She lay motionless, clinging to the upright world with a mobile phone in her hand. She must have got out through the window of the car and tried to crawl back up the escarpment to the road. Some metres away, there was a woman lying face down on the ground. The wheels of the car were pointing upward, as if the world had been turned on its head and the car were now going to continue driving across the sky. He could see fresh signs of damage-the tire marks at the edge of the gravel road, where the car must have gone over, and the scrapes where the undercarriage dragged across a rock, leaving behind a screech in the trees. It was as though the landscape were in shock. As he continued walking, he caught a flash of light reflected on a metal surface, then he stopped and saw an overturned vehicle in the ravine below. There was no sound apart from the birds and the general hum of insects, maybe a dog barking in the valley-all the components of emptiness.

#THE BEHIND THE BEYOND FULL#

It was a remote place with no houses, no farms, only the sharp outline of the mountains against the sunset, full of danger and beauty. As he walked along the road, the evening shadows seemed to contain some premonition. You can read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction stories from previous years, here.Īt first, it was no more than a sensation. This is the third story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series.

The behind the beyond