Tidbit: Chapter 2 Shadows in the Rain

( On a highway, late evening, Eastern Germany)

Although it hit us at the front passenger wheel, the SUV truck spun in front of us. My dad hit the brakes hard, and we slammed into the truck and began to tail spin. The road was so wet the car was lifted to the left side, hit once again by oncoming traffic, and then landed atop the guardrail with the right side torn open as we hung in the balance. With both cars now uncontrollable, the speed and the incline of the coming bridge caused us to roll over the truck before we came to that awful stop. The windshield smashed, and Mom was sucked out in an instant. The car was dangling at the edge; the truck was facing the wrong direction with one front wheel stuck between the tracks of the commuter train. Those few minutes seemed to happen in slow motion: my mother calling out to me, the glass breaking all around me, the car flipping at least three times.

Dad crawled out through the broken glass to the hood, covered with blood and a piece of the sundress Mother was wearing. His face gripped with fear, moving carefully, he reached me in the backseat. I was screaming, a frantic calling for a mother who could not hear me.

As she lay below in the small passage of the River Neckar, Father moved me to the street, holding me tight and setting me in the center of the overpass under a bright hanging lamp. A woman came quickly to my side, but it was not my mother. I was some great distance from the edge of the bridge and had a good view of what was taking place. Dad not wanting to leave me alone, but there was no others cars moving on the road, and the train had already made its pass to the other side of the bridge. A smallish man was running from side to side of the car, grasping and pulling to keep the car from falling. The rain became strong at that moment; as did the flames from the burning gas that had filled the sides of the overpass. Dad tried to help the man get to the woman inside, but the more they tried, the closer it came to falling into the waiting black water below.

As others approached and men ran to help, women screamed out in seer disgust as our family sedan effortlessly went over the edge, as the approaching train was called to a stop that had just left the hospital stop at Theresienkrankenhaus. Nurses and medical staff on their way home leaped from the disabled train to help. Everything was now in slow motion, and tears and rain water covered my face as I looked to see my mother.

Two bodies had fallen into the cold water some eighteen feet or more below, and in no time technicians, students, and police men were in the frigid water, but only one body was recovered. My father and I survived the car crash with minor injuries, and, for my part, hysterical fits. The pain killers given for a child my age left me awakening some nine hours later in the early morning with Dad by my side.

C Cory