Fall

Lying in the middle of the road,
beneath that wooden bridge,
is a girl whose face in unfamiliar.
Her voice echoes between the blacktop
and the thick evergreens, which brings a sense
of urgency to this solitude.

I am scared for her and her screaming
scares me even more, a phone is thrust
into my gaping, empty hands and before
I can wonder what I'm doing, I have dialed.

There is so much little girl in her still,
and I can see it plainly in the way she is
concerned with whether her bra is showing.
I cringe when she asks for someone
to please pull her shirt down in the back,
so my mother reaches forward, and the blood...

The blood rises to her face and makes everything
more red, and more terrible than it already it.
She's lying in a tiny pool of it, but I can't guess
where it's coming from.  Later, I would wonder
where it went.  The asphalt showed no history
of a stain.  The woman's voice, distorted
through telephone wires and satallites, repeats her question.
So I look up in horror, and estimate the height.

Her hair looked like it was pulling when she writhed
on the ground. I wanted to slip it out from underneath
the heaviness of her tangled body. Her shirt, no longer
revealed her secrets, but I knew they would cut it
off of her sweating frame.  I wondered if it was a favorite.

I walked away from the accident when they took
her away with sirens bloating the air, and she was just as nameless
as she had been when we found her broken body
lying on the double yellow line. Still the fate
of a stranger had never seemed so life or death.
It wasn't the last time I would see her tangled...

Tangled in sheets but smiling at seeing our faces
like the bouquets of daisies on her desk.  I wanted
to move towards her, to hug her, to touch her, to see
that she was whole, still.  Covered in wires and tape
or casts that hid a gruesome display I had already seen
at its worst.  She cleaned up well considering...

I remember them flipping her like a pancake
onto a yellow stretcher, poking at her in a hurry
to find out what was the most wrong; looking
for so many answers at once
that their words seemed to be stealing the air
from her mouth.  I wanted to make them get away
so she could breathe all at once and not worry
about choking on a question mark.

They pressed their gloved fingers into the small
of her back and when she winced in pain
it brought a metallic taste to my mouth.
Heads shook with embarrassed pity, while she searched
for a face that could help explain. I was watching
when it hit her, hit harder than the fall, even;
watched them steal that last bit of air
that she had held on onto so tightly.  She couldn't
feel her legs, and she knew what that meant.

She was in pain still, when I saw her tangled
in sheets.  She wasn't fixed yet but she was wiggling
her little toes that paraded a pristine French Pedicure. 
The ten of them reminded her of how close she had come,
how normal her life had been before
that speckled afternoon when I guessed for her.

I guessed that it was her favorite shirt, and I was right.
She told me I was right. And I laughed at the irony
of two little girls who should never have known.