Kevin's mind drifts in and out, without anchor, without direction, not even subjected to the tides of time. He feels nothing. Connected to tubes and wires, he lies in a hospital bed a few miles from his mother's house.

The concept of time blurs. He sees his body, sometimes more dilapidated than other times. Nurses come and go. Doctors shake their heads. Orderlies check on him during the middle of his night. A few times, his mother sits by his bed. She clutches his hand, talks to him, tells him about the weather or his cousin Suzy's upcoming wedding. She asks if he hears, but he cannot answer. He tries to move his lips, twitch his finger, or even flutter an eyelid, without effect.

So he watches.

He doesn't see his mother often. When Kevin wakes, recovering after almost three years in a coma, she isn't there. The doctors don't tell him right away, but she's dead. She dies while he sleeps. He sees this, while trapped in his body; he's not there yet. He hasn't reached that time.

It's an earlier day. He doesn't know when. Maybe it's still the night of the accident. He never sees the other car. An old Queen song blasts on the radio. He doesn't hear the crash. The windshield in front of him becomes a spider web. Part of it crumbles like paper. The hood distorts, with a spray of orange and yellow sparks. The car jolts in the wrong direction, but Kevin continues forward. The steering wheel smashes his chest. He can't breathe. The car folds. Something pierces his thigh. Glass rains over his face. Shards scrape his arms. The seat presses into his back. Dazzling lights, reflections in puddles, seem above him rather than below.

The first sound he hears is a siren. Distant. Far away. It can't be for him, but whose faces are those above him? He can't speak through the mask. It forces oxygen into his lungs. He doubts he could inhale on his own.

The passenger in the other car dies. Penelope. Kevin's mind drifts between the accident and waking, and just a few minutes before or after, so he knows Penelope is pretty by the pictures at her funeral, on her mother's desk, and her boyfriend's wallet. The boyfriend, driving, survives with barely a scratch.

Kevin wonders if they blame him. He wonders if his mother blames them. Maybe they're both wrong. Did they even see Kevin? Did she have a moment, before death, to realize it came for her?

Kevin's mother dies horribly, shot in the chest in her own home. He hates the burglar with the gun.

Kevin follows the man, Chad, as he drives past an accident. He grips the steering wheel tight with both hands. He stares straight ahead, doesn't look at the cop, and he repeats his name like a mantra. He curses. When he pulls into a parking lot outside his own apartment, he checks his breath for alcohol. He staggers from the car, the gun in one hand and a bag in the other.

The bag carries what he stole from Kevin's mother. The gun kills her. Again and again, Kevin watches. She fumbles her keys, walks into a dark foyer. She sets her purse on the counter and turns on the light.

Chad looks like a deer in headlights: one hand half in his bag, eyes wide and bloodshot.

Kevin's mother drops her keys, and is otherwise as paralyzed as the intruder until they hit the floor. The sound acts like an alarm, springing both into motion. She screams. She reaches back for her purse, for the cell phone and its one-bottom emergency dialing. Chad drops his bag, shattering something stolen, and holds now just the gun he had pulled from it. He doesn't aim, but fires three times.

One bullet goes through the pocketbook. Maybe it hits the phone. Another hits the wall. The third throws Kevin's mom against the wall with a splash of blood.

Kevin wants to yell. Cry. Scream. Kick. Yank the gun from Chad's hand. Stop his mother from coming home. Two minutes, and the drunk bastard leaves without ever drawing his gun.

Two minutes.

But Kevin doesn't have that time. He can make it, maybe. He can go back and change something. He wants to make his mother late. Hold her up at a traffic light. Make the money machine at the supermarket malfunction. But he can't do these things. He doesn't know how.

There are things he can do. Suddenly grounded, Kevin looks back at Chad. What led him to Kevin's mother's house?

Chad owns two guns. The one in his car ends up in the gym bag. He dumps shorts and towels and cassettes in the back of his car and stops randomly. He parks at an angle.

Chad breaks in through the kitchen window, cutting himself. The blood, part alcohol, flows freely from his arm. He curses and spits and shoves the kitchen furniture. He searches through the fridge. He finds half a bottle of wine and finishes it as he loads his bag.

But he never should have gotten there. A cop often sits at the corner, close enough not just to have seen Chad approach the house, but to have seen Chad's erratic driving.

But Officer Primrose is at another accident. Sitting in his squad car as he writes a report, he looks up as Chad drives past and shakes his head. The driver may be drunk, or just distracted by whatever he's dumping into his back seat. Either way, Primrose is busy. He can't stop what he's doing. But he grimaces, afraid this is another accident waiting to happen - something he might have prevented.

The accident isn't bad. It's not like the one Kevin survived; no one dies. A man, drunk, smashes a parked car. Primrose, a block away, sees it.

The drunk staggers from his car and weeps. He sheds his first tear before even getting behind the wheel. At the bar, with the help of six shots of whiskey, he tells his friends about the boss.

He describes the boss as Satanic, pacing over worn-down shaggy carpets with a cigar hanging from his permanent scowl. In fact, the boss appears sad before calling him in. "I'm sorry, Winters," he says, "but I just can't have this. Seven times in three weeks, and it's been going longer than that."

"I would've been on time today," Winters says, before leaving the boss's office and starting a tab he never remembers finishing. "I had to let a funeral pass. It's not even ten minutes."

The boss shakes his head. "As much as I like to hear your excuses every day, I just can't."

But a funeral really stops Winters. It crosses in front of him at a major intersection, holding up traffic for almost five minutes.

Five minutes, two minutes - it makes no difference. Kevin still can't change it. But he recognizes a face in the funeral: Penelope's mother.

But this is not Penelope's funeral. That takes place three months earlier. Her boyfriend joins her. At the graveside mass, both mothers weep at their losses.

No accident, this. The boy swallows a bottle of pills and washes it down with a fifth of vodka. He lays next to a picture of Penelope, one from his wallet in which she wears a pretty blue dress and smiles so enthusiastically, it hurts Kevin to see it. The boy cries himself to sleep.

He never wakes up.

Penelope never sees Kevin's car. It's a rough corner. The collision shocks her as much as it shocks him. Her boyfriend, driving, never even loses consciousness. The explosion of glass and metal rains around him, giving him a few scratches and stealing the girl he loves.

He never blames Kevin. He rolls past the stop sign.

It all leads to one thing. Kevin's mother dies because of this, because of Kevin, because he drives a few miles an hour over the speed limit and a younger man at a stop sign never sees him.

Kevin reaches back with everything he's got. The accident had been so sudden, but it doesn't take much to prevent it. A tap of the brakes.

He slams his foot down as hard as he can. The car slows so fast, it stalls. The boyfriend slams on his brakes, throwing Penelope forward in her seat. The seat belt catches her.

Kevin doesn't see it anymore, but lives it. This is real. This is where he is. Both cars stop, mere inches from hitting each other. The boyfriend waves apologetically and drives off, not dead, just like before. But this time with his girlfriend breathing next to him.

And Kevin never enters the coma.

And maybe, just to make certain, he'll take his mother out the night Chad breaks into her house.

END

OUT OF TIME
is Copyright 2000 by John Urbancik and is published in feoamante.com/ Feo Amante's Story Time with his permission.