It was a lovely taste of a spring day in early March after a long, bitterly cold winter. Bryan and I were driving back to Boston from our auto insurer's office in the suburbs. Such a nice day prompted Bryan to simply cruise comfortably in the right lane of the two lane road through West Roxbury and Jamaica Plain.

Just past the Faulkner Hospital, cars were parked on the right side of the street by folks visiting the beautiful but not yet in bloom, Arnold Arboretum. At the edge of this parking area in the breakdown lane of the street, two women were perched on the tailgate of a parked pickup. We would pass them easily except that at a critical moment, a car passing us on our left slammed into our rear quarter causing us to veer to the right into the left rear of the pickup containing the two women. They shrieked and we knew we were going to hit one or both of them. The young redheaded woman was thrown off the tailgate as we hit the brakes. Debris from the crash tore a wound in her neck, and as we jumped out of our car to tend to her, she was bleeding profusely. A piece of metal had severed her carotid artery.

Quickly, I pressed my thumb over her wound shutting off some of the blood flow. Bryan picked her up in his arms, and while her less injured girlfriend screamed we stumbled back to our car with the bloodied redhead.

There was no time to call for an ambulance, yet the hospital was back only 500 yards. Bryan yelled to me to get into the passenger side of our Camry as he held her. I did while I continued to apply pressure to her wound. As Bryan threw her into my lap, he ran around the car to man the wheel. His hands were soaked in blood from his efforts to quell the flow of blood, and this made the steering wheel slippery to grasp. Nevertheless, Bryan accelerated and found an opening in the median strip of the road a few yards ahead, and made a sharp U-turn toward the Faulkner. Blood was everywhere; on my shirt and pants; on the seat and door of the Camry; all over Bryan, and of course all over the woman, herself. By now she had fainted cold.

Miraculously, in no more than 80 seconds from stopping, we pulled up to the emergency room, and Bryan carried her from the car while I continued to apply pressure to the pumping wound. An ER nurse saw the seriousness of the scene and sounded the alarm to alert the staff in emergency. They threw the bleeding young woman on a stretcher and ran her into the hospital. Outside, Bryan and I looked at each other, sat down on the ground, and simultaneously began to tremble. A police siren was wailing in the distance. Shortly they would arrive at the crash site and would comfort the companion. The driver of the car which had caused the accident did not stop, and was not caught as far as we know. The redheaded woman we met so traumatically, survived, and so, gratefully, the story had a happy ending. There was no time for an ambulance! - short fiction by Alvin Stepple, March 2004