First Flash Friday - "Dangerous Crosswinds," Memoir
Even a brief glance can reveal unexpected things.
I’ve found it challenging to be creative in 2025. The world is…well…it is exactly what we all see it to be. The relentlessness of incompetence and cruelty— though sadly, the cruelty itself is always delivered with rare competence—is creatively suffocating. Creativity requires oxygen to ignite the dust motes floating around my brain into something bright and hot enough to illuminate and bake whatever nonsense is in there into something worth reading.
Flash writing—short bursts of words, usually crafted in one sitting—is a bellows that blows in some of that oxygen and heats up the brain. Each Friday, I’ll post a new flash piece here. You’ll never know what you’ll get—may writers focus entirely on fiction. Flash nonfiction is growing in popularity, though, and there are some exciting and convention-defying writers doing cool things in many forms.
This one is free to all of you. Future installments will be for my paid subscribers (but for $5/month, you’ll get something new to read every Friday, live writing chats, creative writing advice, tips on writers to read you might not know yet, and other Very Cool Things (TM)). I hope you’ll sign up. It will give me running away money when my public university employer renames itself The Charlie Kirk University of Telling Professors What to Say and Otherwise Making Sure They Keep There (sic) Whorish Mouths Shut.
And with that, I give you “Dangerous Crosswinds.”
Dangerous Crosswinds
There’s a bridge on I-95 in Maryland that I will someday blow off, me and my tiny Ford Fiesta tumbling hundreds of yards down into a ravine or a river or whatever unknown horror lives in its distant and invisible bottom. When I start my car to drive south of this bridge, to Washington or Florida or wherever, it looms. I can feel it as I cross lesser bridges, envision the sideways lurch of the car when high winds blow, feel the impact on the woefully short guardrails, the tilt as physics takes hold, and the plummet as the car wobbles and gyrates and falls ever down.
II.
Shortly after becoming a parent, I attended the wake of a child. It was a baby, a girl whose parents I had become close with in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of Boston Children’s hospital. Once, before she died, I sat in her room for twenty minutes and made baby noises at her, cooed and giggled, while her mother went downstairs to get a sandwich. Five days before the wake, I’d heard through the hospital grapevine that she had been placed on ECMO, a last-ditch effort to oxygenate her blood outside her body and give her suddenly damaged lungs a chance at recovering. They did not, and the night stole her away.
My daughter’s lungs were damaged, and on one occasion, ECMO was prepped and brought to her bedside, ready to launch at a moment’s notice.
The coffin was open, only one flap on a casket so small, the little girl’s whole body loomed, dressed in white, resting as still as stone on white satin, and I could not make myself step down the aisle to pay my respects. I cowered at the back of the church, paralyzed, and envisioned myself in the place of her parents.
III.
The bridge sneaks up on me, every time, despite its presence in my mind for the entire drive. I always plan to be in the center lane, protected from the fall by the unfortunates on either side. Even better if one of them is a semi, but not both. Both of them will certainly be blown together, crushing me between, while one alone would leave me room to maneuver.
When the signs for “dangerous crosswinds on bridge” appear out of nowhere, I am always in the right lane, feet away from the inevitable. I’m torn between moving faster to get across all the sooner and slowing down, too slow, to have time to react and recover when the certain crosswinds dance up out of the depths and pirouette me across to eternity. I can’t move my foot, paralyzed at whatever speed I am doing, and worry that the grip I have on the steering wheel will soon be loosened by sweat.
IV.
The results of the alpha fetoprotein test, the only marker malignancy in the tumor my daughter was born with, were off the charts. A normal reading is under 15. Hers was 35,000. The doctors were arguing about whether to wait for her to get stronger to start chemo, which would probably give the cancer time to kill her, or to start the chemo, which would probably do the job all by itself. The nurse was trying to teach me about the proper disposal method for a chemo diaper—in a specific kind of biohazard bag, nuclear orange, warning about the dangers of what it contains. I never saw this coming—teratomas, the kind of tumor she had, are almost always benign. They kept coming back, but always benign, and I was not prepared. There were no guardrails.
V.
When I finally make it across the bridge, the relief is immediate, and I need to find the nearest rest stop to avoid pissing myself every single time. But always lurking is the return trip. The winds are stronger on the Northern route, I decide, since it is closer to the ocean.
At the literal last minute, before the chemo was started but after the IV was placed to run it, the lab comes back with new news: her last alpha fetoprotein was 22,000—a remarkable drop. They take the IV out, but not before drawing more blood to test. The ocean still looms to the east, dragged left to right by the force of the moon, spawning storms that will generate dangerous crosswinds. Next time, I know, next time.