Wrecked (Charlotte Roche) by Charlotte Roche

Author:Charlotte Roche
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9780802121127
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Since the accident, I’m the only one who drives. That is, I never let myself be driven by anyone else. I feel as if everyone else drives worse than I do. I haven’t become a nervous driver since then. Not frightened or tense. Just very careful. I drive defensively, always on the lookout. I try to anticipate all the craziness of other drivers. It’s up to me to get everyone in my car safely to their destination. A task my mother was unable to accomplish. It’s my duty. If I am a passenger, I can’t take it for long. Every time we go on vacation, I drive the entire way, regardless of how many hours the trip takes. And anyone who doesn’t like it can’t come with me. I convince myself that I pay more attention than anyone else because I know just how quickly things can happen.

I count all the dead animals along the road. They are like my brothers: innocent little creatures. Anyone who drives is potentially complicit in the deaths of other people. Since the accident, I notice all the signs of other accidents. I’m haunted by accidents. Not just ours, but all of the accidents I see evidence of. The places along the autobahn where the police have sprayed paint to mark the scene of an accident, the scrapes and dents on people’s bumpers, the long skid marks on the asphalt. I see it all and try to imagine who died and whether someone left children behind—which makes it worse. The rules of life must not be broken. And one of them is that parents die before their children. That is the correct order. And everyone should die a natural death. Meaning they should fall asleep and their heart should just stop beating—once they’ve reached an advanced age. For me, cancer at an old age is okay as well. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s—hey, we all have to die of something. That’s just the way it is. But children should not die before their parents, and definitely not in a car accident, car catastrophe. Ripped from life. Without any good-bye. That is brutal. On an ordinary trip on the autobahn I usually count about four dead barn owls, two hawks, one fox, and two cats. I don’t really care about domestic animals. They belong to someone. They get fed. They are not stand-ins for my brothers. But the wild animals pull at my heartstrings when I see them lying there dead. They are proof to me that driving is wrong. That the whole thing is wrong. The fact that we’ve built autobahns through the forest in order to get to places faster strikes me as a huge mistake. The animals were there first. They run around in the woods and don’t know how to get across the street alive. Six lanes of cars racing by. Some of them going more than 200 kilometers per hour. I always hope that they will wrap themselves around the support beam of an

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