Northern Belle

She's driving home, alone, clad in leather jacket, pencil-skirt, and fuck-off pumps. The skyline twinkles on all sides as she races with the early-evening traffic. Her cell phone, expensive sunglasses, handbag, and leather briefcase are sitting on the passenger seat of her shiny black sports car.

Approaching an intersection, the traffic light turns from yellow to red.

"Goddammit.", she sighs, pressing on the brake pedal.

Letting her car roll slowly up behind a white BMW, she brings it to a complete stop and reaches into her handbag for her cigarettes. Lighting one, she exhales and gazes through her side window. She absently begins to entertain one of the scenarios she regularly tinkers with. Like little fire drills in her mind, these are mental rehearsals of what she will do when bad things happen.

Tonight, it's the carjacker-sidling-up-to-the-window-brandishing-a-gun scenario. She's almost decided on the proper course of action to take should it ever happen.

She would pretend to faint.

Of course, it has to be done correctly.

It would be natural to glance upward at the man, so that's what she will do. And because she will be completely unaware of his true intentions, she might even smile coquettishly at him, taking him to be a kindly gentleman, chivalrously alerting her to some complicated mechanical problem that could render her vulnerable to injury.

And then she will glance down and observe the gun.

Her eyes, newly awash with disquietude, will slowly saunter back to meet the evil-doer's cold, steely gaze. After allowing the dastardly varmint to regard a flicker of her distress, her sweet Georgia brown eyes will roll dramatically into the back of her pretty little head.

And then, with delicate grace, she will, as all ladies do when bearing witness to such ungentlemanly conduct, collapse with a flourish onto the horn, thereby innocently sounding a distress signal.

After all, it's rightly unthinkable that even a crackhead carjacking blackguard could shoot a dainty damsel overcome by a case of the vapors!

Fiddle dee dee. Why, the very idea...

The light turns green and the swish of engines revving snaps her to attention. She presses her foot down hard on the accelerator and flicks ash out the opening of her window. She speeds off into the encroaching darkness that hovers ominously before her, and glances into her rearview mirror, imagining the ghost of her assailant being ground into a pile of bloody, mangled pulp underneath the parade of cars following behind her.