By Sabina Rosa Guardado

No one told her about survival. She’s improvising.


Dispatch, we’ve got eyes on the suspect.

Female, late thirties. Dark hair, hollowed eyes. There’s something in her mouth. Blotted with rot, black holes dotting her gums. Scars of neglect — cavities deep enough to puncture her heart. She clings to a wheel of a car that isn’t hers. She can’t remember where the night started, but she knows how it will end.

738, engage pursuit.

She’s running from that dull ache in her mouth. Staring into the rearview mirror — lights flashing behind her — all she sees are the gaps in her smile. They form a map of things that have disappeared, spaces where her mother used to be.

Subject increasing speed, heading south.

She remembers her uncle once crossing this road. He said they were chasing him. You could see it in his eyes — torment crawling just beneath the surface. He went sick.

His mother told him to pray, but he didn’t know how. God never spoke back. So he ran into the lights until his body hit metal and pavement. She sees his stain on the road. She knows she will share his fate.

Suspect may be armed. Proceed with caution.

Armed? She felt weaker than ever — trailing her neglect down the highway. Her mother might be lost somewhere too, chasing something. Her children were home, waiting like she had been twenty years before. She cared, but it didn’t stop the sickness. Didn’t stop the fever.

738, suspect veering off — exit ramp approaching.

The road stretches further than she thought it would. They left her so far away. In the sirens she hears her mother singing her to sleep with hot tea. The fever persists, screeching behind her eyes.

We have a possible collision, subject approaching other vehicles.

Her kids are in the backseat — somewhere in the rearview of her memory. Sick like her uncle. Sick like her. She tries to pray for them, too. But she’s forgotten those words her mother had spoken, brushing her hair the night before she left. Hands on the wheel, knuckles white, she catches the scent of her mother’s tea in the burning rubber beneath her.

Suspect accelerating, clear traffic.

She’s reaching the edge. The slow, quiet collapse of a life neglected. No one told her about survival. She’s improvising.

Collision reported. Subject’s vehicle has hit the median. Requesting EMS.

It went black. The rot in her teeth wasn’t her doing. It seeped through years of the unsaid and undone. She never learned to brush. She never learned to pray. She never learned the name of the hot tea that kept her heart warm.

EMS en route. Condition of suspect unclear.

She knew they would open her chest and find that the rot had consumed her.

738, subject stable but unresponsive.

They’ll try to drag her out of the wreck. But under this pile of metal she can finally remember. She hears that sweet song. Her mother is right there. Her kids are waiting safely at home. The tea spills down her throat.

End of Transmission ■