Margaret Lamb/Writing to the Right-Hand Margin Prize Co-Winner (Fiction)

The car lurched onward, a ruby beetle seeking refuge from an impending seasonal shift,

and the exhaust which trailed it seemed a desperate smoke signal. Guiding the bug on its doomed path was Anthony, and to his right, his seven-year-old daughter, wailing as she cradled a now-four-fingered hand.

Despite having made, by a recognized grace, only one trip to the emergency room in the past seven years, Anthony realized blurrily that he was driving there as if the course were rote: Surmount the San Franciscan hill that was Abrams Ave, crest the top, cross the train tracks at the bottom, and pass under the glare of one traffic light (hopefully green) at the four-way intersection on the other side to pull up to the front doors of the E.R. It was a simple path he now cursed because he’d yet to make it up the hill, as his car sputtered and flitted, pushing forward only in short bursts. All that mattered was getting this hunk of shit down the other side of the hill and through the intersection so that his daughter’s severed digit—a good two-thirds of a pinky finger contained by an iced Ziploc bag in the cupholder—could be reattached. He was trying to focus solely on ending her pain, but he couldn’t keep back the thought that, in a sense, they had been lucky: he’d have cut off her thumb if she’d placed her hand on the other side of the cutting board, as he cried over the onions and the gut-pounding severance of losing his father.

Dad, be with her now, he thought as the car approached the hilltop with trepidation. He didn’t know if he believed in the import behind his invocation, but then the car crested the hill, instantly stalled—and began rolling down the other side. Now just the tracks and the intersection lay ahead.

He said nothing to soothe her because he did not want her to hear his voice quiver or to give an impression of his weakness. If she observed this on her own in later years, so be it; but he would not be the one to let her know. The towel wrapping her hand looked wine-soaked from the blood; he’d used tape to keep it tightly in place because he didn’t believe in her tiny right hand’s ability to maintain pressure. What a sickening story to tell, he thought. “Well, I was crying—over the onions I was cutting!—and I didn’t see her come up through the tears . . .” He could imagine the questions that long lost aunts and uncles would ask him at the funeral.

His father’s funeral, not Kelly’s. There would be no funeral for Kelly—there would NEVER be a funeral for Kelly—because now his car was swiftly descending the hill (it seemed twice as steep going down as it had on the way up) and he was giving no thought to the brake because there were no cars ahead on the road or stopped at the intersection. Hell, if traffic was clear, he’d blow the light. From deep within him, a bellowing laugh rose—it began with a rattle in his diaphragm, slithered up his esophagus, struck the vocal chords, and, before he could retain it, lunged from him and coiled itself around his daughter’s screams.

How strange was it that he was laughing? The thought of his dad’s sneezing had come from nowhere to his mind, and this seemed to be what had brought on the fit. He envisioned the man as he remembered him most clearly: standing in the bleachers of his son’s high school baseball game, wearing the team’s viridian in support and saying, Come on, Ant, hang in there, you got this, as Anthony rounded third base for home. His dad’s sneezing and coughing on those nights after games, exacerbated by the dust from the diamond and by his own weak lungs, never failed to scare the hell out of someone in a nearby room, and Anthony’s mother had made it a tradition to yell in response, “Here comes the—”

Train. At the bottom of the hill, a red-and-white striped arm was falling across the road, coming down to keep cars—to keep him and his daughter—out of its path, but he realized through a sickening self-view that if he hit the brakes they would stop either just in time or in the underbelly of the locomotive. On both sides of the arm signals flared and died over and over, like a warning light being shone through amber, and a bell with a steady beat clanged.

Clenching the steering wheel, he moved his foot from over the brake and pressed the gas to its end with such force that his shaking ankle nearly failed him. His daughter screamed, “Dad! Stop! Train!” and he broke his silence to tell her to hold on, seeing from the corner of his eye her misinterpretation of the command, as her right hand gripped the bloody towel tighter, so that the knuckles went pure as the fist reddened.

Here comes the train . . .

It ran three measly cars long, and he realized that they would clear its front end and make it safe across if the car would keep its same speed. It bellowed at him—he thought distantly of how little it sounded like his father—and then they cracked the striped arm in two, careened over the tracks, and were kissed by the blunt power of the train’s passage through the black plume behind. He found himself trembling, pulling breath in deep drags, crying—but he feared his daughter would turn to see his blood-rushed and contorted face, his pitiful display of masculinity, and be sliced by him again.

Yet she was crying, too—he heard her sobbing, Daddy . . . Daddy . . .—and he thought maybe, if she cried a little harder and he a little less, she’d see nothing through the tears but a blood red towel and he a green light.