Brake Failure

For as long as she could remember,

     she knew.

She just knew.

It wasn't a decision, but rather a realization formed.

"It must be. It must be at all costs. I will be lauded. I will not be like the others." Over time, the inner voice pounded louder into a hardened certainty.

This conviction was never spoken, never revealed - except in deed alone. If questioned of her motives, she'd not reply. Her business was her own.

With an assassin's silence, her pursuit relentless and clear-eyed, this one master she served above all, a master she called God, to deceive both heaven and hell in assumed cleverness.

She lived above the world, in a cloud blessed by her irrefutable estimation, the only possible crime: her feet to touch the ground; apart from the masses was she, a more deserving being, destined to escape the dire traps of the average soul.

Little by little she accumulated success, building a monument to her life to be hailed and glorified in the name of God; they'd come worshiping at her temple, praising her, admiring her achievements, lauding a lifestyle reserved for the special and privileged few.

But this morning, she awoke with a tinny taste in her mouth. A switch had flipped. A worm had turned. She'd reached the end of a road.

The usually intoxicating smell of her fine Italian leather revolted her; the window light seemed foreign; voices - in her head, on TV, in the world around her - mumbled into an incomprehensible background cacophony.

She sought to escape the million dollar confines of her condo in her luxury auto. "What's happening to me? My pleasures have turned to torments! What can I live for? Everyone will find out the fraud I am, that my life is misery, and I will be outcast as a failure to our worldly bribe."

Thirty plus years in the making, she'd reached the holy grail of the con of cons, convincing herself that outward success meant inward success and none would be the wiser of the betrayal of her dreams - that which actually should be "at all costs" - and her vile single-minded pursuit of worldly acclaim.

"Why now??" But it didn't matter why, just how she could go forward on a diet she cannot stomach. She had her marriage thing, her dollar thing, her daughter thing, and her life safely in the clouds. If that's not enough then what's left under the sun? Winding her way up the mountain road she read doom in the eyes of each oncoming driver.

"Nothing I can see."

She pulled over to an empty lot, facing the wide vista of a high mountain scene.

"I'm the clever one! I fooled the world into thinking I'm something when I'm nothing! Haha! How to keep the lie alive!"

In her angry retreat from life she'd rowed herself out to sea only to open her eyes to find landless horizons in all directions.

Had she been insane the entirety of her life?

The constant inner chant, "Obtain more accoutrements of success!", her religion to save her from oblivion had put her in oblivion; a pervert she be, the beast she hated as a dreaming child.

Her solitary sojourn had reached its requiem. The blind spots in strangers - the currency of her life - bankrupted her hope as her true hopes were declared the enemy to be denied and life a perpetual hunt for a place to hide.

The clean light of the afternoon sun glanced off her windshield, a flying ant landed on her hood to seize the day; she was victimized. "An ant with fucking wings! Why would God make that horrible thing? Just to terrorize us! Is life not sacred to You? Get Your priorities straight! What is God but a keeper of denial?"

Then, with a blink she blanked. Not a damn thing she'd done meant a damn thing; imprisoned the remainder of her days to slowly dissipate; God laughing louder in bottomless victory as torment increases from the poisoned well of her pride; her lines of communication cut in bouts of vacuous vanity; the Word remaining imagined, never faced. She'd not been there for herself.

"My lie is over!" she confessed to the world. "Who can want me now?"

CODA: The police officer remarked on the lack of skid marks where the car ran off the mountain road to its fiery demise. "It's either brake failure or suicide." Her family was indignant. "It most certainly was not suicide! She had everything to live for. For her to even think of killing herself is absurd!" The officer looked at the faces of the adamant family members and complied with the desperate final cover-up. Then they too continued in the abyss of the dutifully demented as the world continues its descent.