The car starts to drift, and I’m anywhere but behind the wheel.
Okay, that’s a little pretentious, even for me. I’m still there, of course, in the physical sense. My body is securely belted into the driver’s seat, bones creaking and innards sloshing against the sudden change in gravity. The car is going one way and, for a few moments, my fleshy parts continue on in the direction we were driving. It’s a science I’m sure I could understand if I took the time to properly study it but, with the control of the vehicle being so much more important, I haven’t. Part of that science involves time travel or, to give it its correct term, dilation. A compression, if you will. A slowing-down that shunts my soul out of the fireproof racing suit and laughs at it slips the fibrous bindings that hold my meat in place. I can see the dust particles suspended in the air inside the cockpit, the individual drops of mud as they splatter against the windshield and split into tiny rivers before the inexorable swipe of the wipers sweeps them aside. Here, in this state, I’m free.
The car starts to shudder, and my hands make the necessary corrections. We’re already well into the drift, sliding almost perpendicular to the angle that we entered the turn. I must align the wheels just so, otherwise there’ll be no squirting out the other side. If I’m off by a centimeter, a beautiful drift becomes a deadly skid. Any number of horrible things could happen. I’m surprised they don’t happen more often, given the number of random factors that I’m relying on to execute this maneuver. But I don’t worry about it, it’s not something I have the capacity for in that disembodied state. Everything’s happening automatically, and I’m just along for the ride.
First draft: 150206
Published: 230904