Ellison white Out

 ONE

October 9, 1987
Annecy, France
1900 hours

MY FATHER’S screams echo in the small car.
“Monte vite, Angélie, baisse-toi! Baisse-toi!”

My head hits the floor just as the window shatters. Blood,
thick and hot, sprays my bare legs. I wedge myself under my
mother’s skirts, her thighs heavy against my shoulders. I know
she is already dead. We are all dead.

Flashes of black.
Two distinctly male voices, one female. Another, a
stranger’s call, silenced abruptly with a short fusillade of bullets.
The would-be savior’s bicycle smashes into the side of our aging
Peugeot. His body catapults across the hood onto the pavement
beyond and his head hits the ground; the crack sounds like the
opening of a cantaloupe, ripe and hard;

My father, his life leaving him, slides down in the seat like a
puppet cut from its strings. He’s whispering words over and over,
faintly, and with the cacophony in the background I can barely
hear him. I risk a glance, wishing I’d not. The image shall never
leave me. Red, pulpy and viscous. He is missing half his face, but
his full lips are moving.