Erma Bombeck Writing Competition - Winners
2006
Erma Bombeck Writing Competition
Honorable Mention
Human Interest - Global
Dennis Roddy
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
"Allies and Stanwix"
| Her name is Debbie. She’s a legal secretary. Whether she will be one again, I do not know. She has broken ribs, a fractured skull and, if God is merciful, no memory of 6:51 a.m. Monday at the corner of Allies and Stanwix. I’d caught the early 36A out of Mt. Lebanon while it was still dark, so I could stop at the O’Reilly box office to get tickets for “Wicked.” I was in a rear seat, just behind the back door, when I heard, in succession, a thump, some screams and the sound my face makes when it hits a metal-and-plexiglass partition. My next memory is ankles turning into legs turning into the faces of the strangers who raised me from the floor. I wondered if my left eye had gone blind. It was clouded by blood. “We hit a woman,” someone told me. “You’re bleeding,” another said. What about the woman? I asked. Someone called an ambulance. Someone called two. The driver shuddered in the front seat, a cigarette giving him no comfort. His eyes were wet. He looked at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. I wanted to hug the guy. For a moment, I almost apologized for the coffee I’d spilled on the bus floor. I tried to tell him it was all right, that he needed to feel better, but there is no reason to think he will. It is as if he had two options as a man: to live life indifferent to the misfortunes of others, even when he was a tangential player in their tragedies; or to embrace mankind and feel for others, an act that at once has made him more alive and more prone to the wound that must be bleeding somewhere in his spirit now. At the hospital, I heard someone talking about the woman. Head injuries. She would live. What would come after that, no one seemed to know. There was a first name, a job description. We would have known more about her from a grave marker. I was 3-1/2 hours late to the box office, my eye stitched, my jacket splotched with blood, my head an overweight melon. I went back to Stanwix to catch a bus home. At the corner, a man was staring into a red splotch several feet from the chalk line that recorded the front of the bus. “Woman got hit here,” he said. “I heard it on KQV. There was an accident.” “I know. I was there.” “You saw it?” he brightened. “I saw shoes,” I replied, and walked back to catch my bus. I had seen nothing and felt all of it. |