Joey and Max took turns beating one another, figuratively speaking. It could be about anything. Long, epic shouting matches that made everyone around them uncomfortable. Both were handsome men but during the past year cruelty had a tendency to spill out of them, below the belt shit that distorted the goodwill they'd earned and made them appear ugly, even to their closest friends.
Had it always been this way? And why did they let it go on? Questions that did not concern Amber, whose mind was full of other things, the nature of which she hadn't quite confirmed. It had been the sort of day where rain teased the sky for hours without making landfall. She was a waitress and the customers were dickheads. After an unbearable shift, she crossed a major thoroughfare and was hit by a bus. Tourists rushed to the edge of the double-decker to get a look at the working class roadkill, shifting the weight of the vehicle and nearly tipping the whole thing over.
Amber was splayed on the concrete, twitching, bleeding, shifting in and out of consciousness when, at some point, a passerby kneeled beside her. Amber's limbs tingled in his presence. It'll be OK, he said. Help is on the way.
She came to on a gurney, surrounded by four notably hot policewomen as though she'd awoken in someone else's fever dream. Where was the man who comforted her on the ground? Nobody at the scene fit that description, the sexy cops told her. Paramedics had arrived almost immediately and started chest compressions. "Lucky break!"
But he must have been there, Amber insisted, I remember him dialing 911. And his brown eyes. He held my hand for several minutes before... Amber struggled to put all the pieces together but the sketch of the memory was potent.
The doctors shrugged. Amber was unstitched.
Over the following weeks, bedridden in the hospital, she would call the tour bus company and threaten to go public with the accident, negligence this, negligence that, if they didn't provide her with a list of the passengers names.
Amber howled stuff like I DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT PRIVACY! into the receiver which prompted the nurses to tinker with her morphine drip. The bullying worked, however, and the company eventually caved. She spent the remainder of her convalescence scouring social media for traces of the mysterious figure, yet none of the tourists, little faces in squares, were a match.
But it's miraculous how well you've recovered, Joey said. Max nodded in agreement. And how true, her bones had mended within a few months and there was nary a scar. Over time the accident and the man became anecdotes, echoes, and what was once an apparition became accepted as hallucination, a necessary function of survival, as everything is.