ROAD KILL

I saw a man drive over a turtle today.  I was driving to a breakfast fast-food joint down the street from Shop-At-Home Television and a large turtle, probably larger than a television set, though not a flat screen television set, was walking directly in front of me, crossing the street.  Turtles are very slow creatures.  I stopped my car, literally stopped my car, and inched around him, making sure not to even get near him, as I have no data on how turtles might move if scared.  Maybe they scamper when scared; I don’t know; in any case I inched slowly around him, turning my steering wheel with the utmost caution, and I passed the turtle and almost congratulated myself on passing this turtle, really I felt like patting myself on the back.  I dodged a turtle.  A vegetarian and a pro-turtle person, I told myself, I can now finally call myself, officially and with all-caps-locked, Pro-Turtle, Pro-Wildlife, Anti-Suburban, Anti-Highway, Anti-Harm, Anti-Death, Pro-Life-In-Some-Generic-Pantheistic-Way.  I loved the fucking turtle.  I even watched it as I accelerated away from it, happy with myself and seeing it in my rear-view mirror---…--- dot, dot, dot, when, it must be said, I have no words for what comes next, though here it is: a rusted white sedan turned around the bend in the road behind me, and, having plenty of time to stop, plowed directly over the turtle, the turtle going straight under the centerline of the vehicle and emerging behind the car.  Though not unscathed.  As I said, this turtle was larger than a television set.  I couldn’t actually see what happened to the turtle but I did see what happened next.  I hit a red light.  The white sedan hit a red light.  Right next to me.  I looked over.  There was a passenger, a woman, with her hands covering her face and she was either screaming or laughing--I couldn’t tell, and being rather stunned, I only vaguely remember a few details.  I believe I should list these details as an exact description of my state of mind is impossible as I was in some type of shock, some type of stunned silence, terror really, some type of mental incapacitation, maybe a protective fog, its purpose being to protect me from the reality of the situation, and this fog clouded my memory and my thoughts from myself.  And so a list is really all I can offer, despite every effort to the contrary.

1.  The white sedan had rust surrounding each door.
2.  The woman was crying, or laughing, moving back and forth in the passenger seat with her hands covering her face.
3.  The man--the driver--was obese.
4.  The man had a large arm rested outside the window, and in his hand was a burning cigarette.
5.  The man slowly took a drag off this cigarette, nonchalantly, as if nothing had happened.
6.  There was no noise.
7.  I have no feelings of my own.

The light turned green.  He went straight and I turned into the gas station.  I was disgusted with everything, really nauseated, and furious.  The stunned silence turned to rage against everything: obesity, cigarette smoking, driving, suburbs, myself, my job, highways, roads, cement--everything except turtles and their right to walk across a street without being hit.  I was eating breakfast.  Eating breakfast was the whole goal of my driving down this suburban street, and I did eat breakfast, but naturally I couldn’t get the turtle out of my head.  The worst part --and here we arrive at the crux, the real sizzler, is that I had to pass that very same turtle on the way back.  And that turtle was dead.  Mutilated.  It’s legs had been ripped off; some piece of one of them was lying a few feet away in a bloodied mess.  The top of the shell was gone.  Replacing it was a reddish pulpy matter.  And I could see this reddish pulpy matter sticking up out of the top of this dead turtle’s shell.  Whatever organs are at the top of a shell--muscle, I don’t know, I don’t pretend to know but I doubt there are essential organs up at the top of a shell, but whatever this tissue was, was  protruding, the top of the shell having been ripped off by the undercarriage of the white sedan.  As I said I had to drive passed this mutilated corpse on my way back from breakfast, and my disgust only deepened as I had suspected incorrectly at first that the turtle may have been small enough to emerge unscathed.  Obviously I was wrong.  This corpse remained there until later in the day, when someone removed all trace of it.  Nothing left.  The road was empty almost immediately, I assumed.  The road kill removal team, I thought, must be quite efficient.