Honey

Honey

Mark LaFlamme

We might meet some day and polite society calls for introductions. I’ll present my hand and you will take it automatically. The handshake is such an instinctive custom. You squeeze and pump the stranger’s hand and assess the grip. Is it firm and steady? Is the palm dry with confidence?

A look of confusion will cross your features but I won’t see it. There is something strange about the clasp of my hand, isn’t there? The fingers do not cross over the back of your knuckles as you are accustomed to. There is an abbreviated sense about my grip that is apparent at once.

Abbreviated, indeed. A quick glimpse at our joined hands will reveal to you that the tips of my fingers are gone. You will behold stumps that end a half inch from where fingernails normally reside.

You may cringe from the sight of them but that causes me no distress. It’s been five years since I lost the tips of my fingers. I’m blind to the reaction of strangers.

Five years. All that time passed since I watched my Honey plummet into the maw of a mountain. Down and down she went, as if the mountain were swallowing her.

The car rolled and bounced and my Honey was tossed and thrashed about inside. I screamed and watched her descend as the blood from my fingers pooled on the mountain road and streamed over the edge, as if following my Honey to her doom.

Five years and I have not recounted this story once, not even to the investigators who found me on the mountain side. But I will tell it here and be done with it, because it’s a story that belongs in hell. Writing with these diminutive fingers is a chore, but it is memory that hinders me most. I will be brief.

My Honey was an angel of such classic beauty, her image should be immortalized in paintings on cathedral walls. Magnificent statutes in ancient gardens should stand in her honor.

I found her during the construction of a church, how providential is that? We shared a religion and a commitment to it. The congregation gathered to raise the roof of the holy house and she was there. When my eyes fell upon her, I believed she was an angel sent by Jehovah to guide me. I am certain today it wasn’t so. No God of mine would have sent this angel to such oblivion. I cast Jehovah out of my heart the very moment she was gone.

Honey was a small creature with sad eyes and dark hair like vines. I could write tomes about the depth of her features, even with my freakish fingers aching and struggling with the pen. I will not however, because tears sting my eyes and rage fills my heart. I will proceed and hope you intuitively grasp the beauty I have lost.

We were married in August and New Hampshire was our honeymoon destination. The top of Mount Washington beckoned us from the foothills. We wanted to be closer to Jehovah and to experience the joys of the earth from above. Honey smiled so serenely, and gazed so wondrously at the wilderness around us, I would have carried her to the peak if it were the only way.

I drove with expert care up the auto road that winds and bends toward the summit. Honey stared out at the expanse of wilderness and spoke breathlessly about the marvel of it all. We ascended the tree line and the Appalachians spread out before us like a gift that had been imparted. The late afternoon sun was a ferocious ball of fire casting a divine glow over all of it.

Pavement gave way to dirt and the road narrowed. On her side of the car, Honey was treated to a glorious, unadulterated view of the mountain chain. At her side was all that the earth had to offer up, with no fences or rails or posts constructed by man. The tops of trees were beneath her, looking wee over the edge of the dizzying drop.

My Honey, she had a way of gazing on beauty that only intensified her own. A smile touched the corner of her lips. Her eyes gleamed like a child’s – one who sees for the first time something so fantastic, it seems like magic. Adopted and poor as a child, Honey had never seen the mountains or the ocean or the splendor of the untainted wilderness. Her expression was one of rapture.

I always gazed upon my Honey with rapture of my own. I watched her in private moments. I watched her in sleep. I watched her and swooned and felt like I was dreaming – a man asleep in an ancient garden, dreaming of the statuary above him.

I watched her now as we ascended Mount Washington. The narrow road bent dramatically to the left, with jagged rocks to one side, a drop of a thousand feet to the other.

I felt the car lurch to the right and tore my gaze from my beloved. The road had snaked sharply to the left and now I yanked the steering wheel in that direction. My reaction was quick but not quick enough. The tires on the right side of the car spun through dirt and then slipped over the edge of the roadway. The engine screamed and the car tilted drastically to the right. My Honey made a short, sharp sound as she sucked in a breath. Her tiny frame thumped against the door and she looked over at me with alarm.

My eyes are dry at this moment, because the shame and guilt and horror of the moment has boiled the tears away. What happened next is an eternity of seconds which I will relive over and over in nightmares.

The car shuddered to a stop. The tires were still spinning and the engine whined. I felt the vehicle slip, just a fraction of an inch more, perhaps, toward the edge of the roadway. Panic threatened to overtake me and caused my vision to blur.

I recovered enough to twist the key and shut down the engine. A monumental silence seemed to assail us. Honey was staring at me with round, brown eyes and her jaw clenched tight in fear. Beyond her, the lush green foothills sprawled thousands of feet below us. A million jagged rocks and boulders marked the descent.

The car leaned sickeningly toward the edge of the roadway. The engine ticked as it cooled. We were a half mile from the summit. No cars passed us on the way up or down.

That horrible look of fear on my Honey’s face... I wanted joy there, always. My life was wound around that expression of rapture and wonder. Everything I was or would ever be was invested in keeping the bliss there on Honey’s face forever.

The tires on the right side were over the edge of the road, hanging over the abyss. But what solution would draw us out of this dilemma remained elusive. I petted my Honey’s hand, tried to smile at her and then turned to open my door. I stepped out onto the gravel, embraced by the chilled, mountain air, and felt the car rise up behind me.

I say it rose up, and it did. My side of the vehicle lifted off the ground the moment the ballast of my weight was gone. The car leaned further toward the edge of the mountain and I could hear metal digging into gravel. I wheeled and saw the underside of the car and it was sliding away from me.

I will ask you to imagine my horror because no man could adequately describe it. This car had carried us away in marital bliss and now was slipping over the descent with my bride trapped inside. I heard her scream once and the sound echoes back to me whenever the silence is too deep. My Honey screamed my name because I was her husband and protector.

I lunged at the car and grabbed it with my hands. My fingers clamped upon the underside of the vehicle, clutching at warm metal in an underhand grip. The car pulled me toward the edge of the road like a tide. My feet fought for purchase in the loose gravel beneath them and I slid closer to oblivion. Metal screamed as it tore through dirt and stone.

I was a man attempting to halt the force of gravity, it’s true. A ton of metal hanging over empty air will fall unimpeded by the efforts of any man. But for a moment – and I will swear to this until I die – the inertia of the car falling away from the mountain was halted by the enormity of my will. Muscles were stretched and ripped in all parts of my body as I clutched the car and tried to pull it away from doom. I lifted my face to the sky and shrieked, and my hands remained fastened on the metal just below the open door of our honeymoon car. I could not let it be my Honey’s coffin. I would not!

They say I tore more than a dozen tendons in my arms, legs and joints. My vocal chords were ripped as I screamed with determination and agony. But my love for Honey is stronger than the forces of physics. I might have continued fighting those forces forever but for the fragile condition of the human body.

I heard pops in my wrists but ignored them. The skin of my forearms split open but there was no pain. Something cracked inside my right shoulder, but it did not thwart my effort. I felt the knuckles of my fingers trying to pull apart, but I would not let them. To lose my grasp would be to submit my Honey to the horrible destiny of the drop.

What the forces of nature cannot do to the human spirit, they will eventually achieve by violence. I felt the tip of my middle finger go first. There was a sensation of suction and then it was gone, like a cork plucked from a bottle. I struggled harder to maintain my grip but then more fingers began to come apart.

The index fingers went almost simultaneously. The tips were tugged off as easily as dandelions being flicked from their stems. I screamed through a throat that was already ravaged and fought for a grip with remaining fingers. But the tips of each of them were ripped away, as if by a cruel, invisible devil.

The car went over the edge of the mountain as the tip of my right pinky was torn from my hand. My fingers shot blood toward the overturned vehicle as if inaugurating its departure. The car thumped over the edge, landed roof first against a boulder and then spun toward the next impact.

I fell to the ground and leaned over the side of the roadway. The sound of the car rolling and crashing was like thunder from hell. I saw the underside and then it flipped up to reveal the mashed roof and shattered windows. The car smashed against a boulder that looked to me like pumpkin 50 feet down. The impact twisted the car again and flung it into the air. Then it landed again and continued the deadly roll with more sounds of thunder.

I reached with gore covered, mutilated fingers as if I could tempt the car back to me. I screamed Honey’s name and thought I would hurl myself down onto the rocks. Then the car rolled and spun and was briefly held up by a pair of narrow, sharp boulders that looked like tongs.

I stared in madness as the rocks tried to hold and keep the car as I had done. For a moment, the screaming of metal and the explosion of impact had ceased. In me, there was blind and senseless hope that my Honey would survive. I would climb down to her and find her battered but alive, and I would carry her to the top of the mountain with the muscles and will that remained.

Her face appeared in a square of darkness that had once been the windshield. Blood streamed from her brow and over those delicate, crab apple cheeks. My Honey looked toward the top of the mountain and seemed to be crying out. I listened and fancied I heard her calling my name. She was alive! Alive and calling for me and I would rush to her.

I will not say with complete conviction that what I saw and heard are entirely as it was. I was insane by then, I am sure of it. And the moment was fleeting. It was a small pause in the terror that will contaminate the rest of my days.

Gravity and inertia and all the wicked ways of the universe took her again. The jagged rocks that held the car ripped through metal and then let it go. The car heaved end-over-end over a 40 foot drop and thumped down onto more rocks waiting to pound and pummel it.

The mountain was a giant jaw, chewing apart my Honey and swallowing her down into its gullet.

The sounds of the assault grew dimmer as the descent continued. I heard the car crashing through smaller rocks and then the brittle sounds of tree limbs cracking. Eventually, the sounds ceased altogether. And at some point soon after, I went after my Honey.

They say the blood loss that caused me to lose consciousness saved my life. A ghastly irony, isn’t it? I was found near death on a rocky ledge just a hundred feet from the spot where I had lost the fight for my bride.

What happened next isn’t important at all. I spent months in a hospital. The tips of some of my fingers were found at the edge of the auto road, but there was no attempt to reattach them. Had surgeons done so, I would have ripped them right off again -- those hateful, weak fingertips that had cost me the battle for my darling, my life, my bride.

So, when I shake your hand, you will discover that my grip is freakish. You will see that I have lost the tips of my fingers and you will wonder how it came to be. Hands are such intimate parts of our interaction with others, that seeing them mutilated can be a disturbing experience. React with revulsion if need to. Wince and recoil and pull your hand away. Scowl with disgust, I don’t care. I told you I cannot see these reactions. I told you I am blind to them.

No long after beholding my Honey’s beaten, bloodied face in the square of darkness that was once the windshield, I used what remained of my fingers to claw my eyes out. I dug them out with stubs of bone and torn flesh and gave them to the mountain to keep. Should a miracle surgeon put them back into my head, I would only rip them out once more.

The eyes that beheld the loss of my Honey on Mount Washington belong in hell, with my fingertips and my memories.

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