Ask Me Why
by Frances Koziar
I loved you, I think. Maybe that’s why I still remember.
Or maybe it’s because of the accident. Because you were taken from me without my say-so. Because I pulled myself out of the wrecked car, climbed around to the other side, and found you flattened and pierced, bleeding and smelling and dead.
Because you were ruined.
I noticed you first, months before that day, because of your laugh. It carried across the street like sparkling ice tinkling through winter’s waves, and I followed its sound to an ordinary young woman holding a leather handbag. That golden laughter lit up your eyes with something I had never known.
And I had to know it. I needed to know it. I needed to know you.
When I kidnapped you, you spoke to me. You looked into my eyes. You wanted to understand.
The others just died. Sculptures, questions, works of art when I didn’t know what art was. I changed them, collected them, arranged their corpses into tableaux as I tried to make a world that I wanted to see. A world that was perfect. A world that would never hurt anyone.
But you were different. Despite how tightly you clutched your handbag, you asked me quietly who I was, as if there was an answer. You asked why I took you, why I took the others. You asked me why I would kill you.
And then the road killed you instead. I touched your body, broken as I would never have broken it, and wished you could have told me the answers.
Frances Koziar has published over 150 pieces of prose and poetry, and is seeking an agent. She is a young (disabled) retiree and a social justice advocate, and she lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Website: https://franceskoziar.wixsite.com/author