Last Sentence

The Prompt: Select a book at random in the room.  Find a novel or short story, copy down the last sentence and use this line as the first line of your new story.

In the first case, the need was to renounce the consciousness of a nonexistent immobility in space and recognize a movement we do not feel; in the present case, it is just as necessary to renounce a nonexistent freedom and recognize a dependence we do not feel.

Or to put it more bluntly. I was in real trouble.

To put it still more severely, everything was happening too fast for me to have any real thoughtful reflection on my predicament. But if I’d been able to slow time down, like they do in the movies, that’s probably what I would have thought.

It’s funny how you keep doing stupid things right up until they really cost you and then it’s like scrabbling at air as you go off a cliff, wishing you could somehow take it all back and be smarter this time.

A thousand times I gambled.  Fiddled with the radio, opened a bag of chips--taking my hand off the wheel and willing the car to stay in it’s lane for the split second it would take me to get the bag open.  And then there was my phone.  The phone!  Finding my songs, taking a call, and yes, yes even checking my text messages and shooting a reply.

But it was so easy to do, so easy to trick myself, to “renounce consciousness” as a I would say if I were a great novelist instead of someone literally, but unwillingly, about to renounce consciousness.  You know it’s dangerous, but it feels so safe.  Sure it’s two tons of metal hurtling along at 80 mph. But in a quality car--like the one I drive, unfortunately--it feels like you’re barely moving at all.  Just floating on air, and who wouldn’t take a second to que up the perfect song for the drive when you’re essentially at a standstill.  

And now I have no choice but to recognize that it’s all out of my control now--the song, the drive, the car even now careening towards the guardrail.  There’s nothing left to do but depend on that which I’ve never needed more but never felt less certain of:

Jesus, take the wheel.