“Please wake up”

Get into your car, do 60 on the interstate on a sunny day when the roads are empty. Make sure you’re mad as all hell and that you’re not really pay attention. Take a wrong turn, miss a sign, crash into a wall that’s sprung up into the middle of the goddamn road just because it felt like it.

“Please, please she’s coming…please wake up…”

Crashing into a Snorlax feels like one of those made-up crashes in TV dramas. None of it is staged, but none of it feels as if it’s actually happening. When you smash into its blubbery belly there’s just this push that makes the front of your car crumple like folding origami paper. You see its skin wave, fur bobbing up and down, suspended on a sea of fat and it looks almost cartoonish. You think of a tiny mouse, jumping up and down on a fat cat’s belly and you might just have time to crack a smile.

“Get up. Get up. Get up…”

Then there comes the mighty push, as your car’s speed is reduced to zero in no time flat and those 60 miles an hour turn into a steam hammer that’s as big as the damn world and smash at the back of your head. If you’re wearing a seatbelt it’s biting into your chest and shoulders, probably cracking a rib as it struggles to keep you in place, leaving a blue-black snake trail across your chest The blubbery fur of the Snorlax splits and the whimsy is dispelled, as your two-ton vehicle runs through it, ripping through its skin, smashing through its ribs as it goes.

There’s something on my face, something covering my nose and mouth, making it hard to breathe. Takes me a while to realize that what I’m struggling to breathe through is fact plain old oxygen. I try to sit up and white-hot pain explodes in my chest, runs across my entire body like a current.

If you’re not wearing a seatbelt, then you’re ejected through the windshield, smashing through plated glass. Perhaps you have time to register the cuts on your face and arms, but what you notice is how your car is now floating in mid-air, surrounded by powdered glass and Snorlax blood. To a romantic, it looks like a snowglobe from Hell. There’s a buzzing noise and you know it’s your blood pumping in your head, mixed with the slowed down dying roar of the great big beast. In freefall, the road seems to stretch out toward eternity, all the way to the horizon, disappearing into the sun.

Stolen novel; please report.

And then you crash onto the asphalt and you don’t think any more.

Clenching my teeth, I struggle to breathe again and get up slowly. Something grinds against my chest. Something heavy sits across my left arm. My legs feel like ice in a martini glass, a crushed mass that dreams of solidity. Something’s whistling behind my eyeballs and I know that it’s the sound of my own breathing.

If you were doing 60 and you’re extremely lucky, then you might just land on your side against the asphalt. This way, you’ll get your arm crushed and maybe risk breaking half your ribs but you will still be able to walk away from this. If you’re just a regular old bastard having a bad day, God might see it fit that you land on your feet. This will turn your knees into powder and crack your spine. You won’t be able to walk again, but at least you’ll still be alive.

If you’re me, then you’re going to land on your head. Maybe your body will cushion the fall and you’ll end up rolling against the asphalt, crushing every bone in your body. Your brain might also get knocked around and barely held from spilling out by sheer damn luck and the fact that you landed against some bushes.

“Mister? Can you get up, mister?”

I look beside me and all I see is a tiny little mouth and a pair of black-on-black eyes, suspended in a cloud of cotton candy. The way it moves, the sounds it makes, they sound like words but I know they can’t be words. It wiggles a pair of tiny and fingerless appendages that I know they can’t be arms.

“Please mister, she’s coming…”

The important part is: you weren’t doing 70, or they’d be hosing you off the road by now.

“You need to get out of here, mister. You need to get up!” the tiny mouth says and the black on-black eyes plead and the little limbs wiggle. The Chansey pushes something into my fist, hard and round, then clenches my fingers around it. I look around and I see that I’m in a surgery room. I can’t smell anything through the mask, but I imagine the smell of disinfectant, antibiotics and old people. There’s a gurney beside me, covered in cloth.

With your tiny, addled, stupid little monkey brain you’re thinking: at least you got picked up by somebody who had the decency to send you to the hospital.

And then you realize that no hospital in its right mind would ever employ a fucking Chansey in the first place.

“She’s here.” The Chansey says before it bolts out the staff exit and the surgery room door bursts open. I turn around and all I see is a grinning face, moon-white with holes for eyes, streaked with green. There’s crazy in those eyes, a kind of crazy I’ve seen before in a mirror on a Monday morning.

There’s a smile that belongs on a wolf, starved for weeks.

“Oh. You’re awake” says Nurse Joey.