“Come on, yeah!”
“How long do we have?”
“Hurry up.”
“If I don’t know how much time we have, I can’t do it, I have to feel the pressure.
“Shit,” I said, shaking my phone as I typed “sunrise today” into Google.
“It goes up to 5.58. Five fifty eight, come on!»
“And what time is it?”
“Shit. Fucking 5:43.”
“We also keep our distance.
“We have to stop now. Run away. Get the car out of there.”
Kneeling in front of the hole with shaking hands in my grip, I scooped up the sand and covered the girl, who was all discolored and blotchy. I never saw him dead. That is, I saw my grandfather dead, he was on the bed, fully dressed, combed, he was more beautiful dead than alive. But I’ve only seen a real dead man like that in movies and I thought they do corpses really well in movies because he was the same, he had gray skin and purple lips.
“Come on, it’s done,” Mirko said, pulling the collar of my sweatshirt to stand up.
I was paralyzed for a moment, my knees burned, I stood up like an old man with joint problems.
“I’ll drive, I can’t see you,” said Mirko.
I handed him the keys to the teal Twingo.
“Now we take it straight to the scrap yard, shall we?”
I looked through the foggy window without an answer, it was starting to lighten on the side facing the sea, the window seemed white.
«I’m going to your cousin’s house, huh? Shall I go to the fat man?” he said as he stepped on the gas pedal.
“Yes, yes, good,” I replied.
“And who will tell your mother?”
“I don’t know, Mirko.”
Mum bought the green Twingo used, it belonged to someone who was a representative for hair products, it was almost twenty years old and had a lot of miles on it.
“I’ll come up with something. That she stopped, that the fat guy came for us and then crushed her with a press because she couldn’t walk anymore.”
“A bit generic.”
“You’re annoying, Mirko,” I blurted out. “You just have to believe it.
Leave from Ostia waterfront, Mirko downshifted to third, entered the roundabout, the right wheels skidded on the asphalt wet from salt. The salt will eat away at this place, hopefully soon it will also eat away at the dead girl we buried under the sand, I thought.
“But this one was supposed to go over there?”
“You have to forget about it,” said Mirko.
“How the hell am I going to do that?”
“If you don’t think about it, it goes away quickly.”
We were on the straight, it was almost time I looked at the speedometer, the display in yellow characters said 90x, the limit was 50, the car did not hold the road or speed, it drove completely disorganized and every now and then a creaking noise was heard. I thought that if we kill each other, that’s the end, then I thought of Mirko, I didn’t want him to die, but maybe if we had an accident, only I would die. This is what I was hoping for. I turned to the window again and closed my eyes, trusting the thing, breathing in the lower part of my stomach while I prayed to God: let the car skid, let us hit a tree, let Mirko survive, unharmed, and I’m dying immediately. I haven’t been to church since my grandfather’s funeral, three years ago, but God is always there for his faithful. That’s what my mother says, maybe it’s true.
We heard the siren. I felt like I was lifting my ass out of the seat, I froze on my feet, I turned to look behind me, the back window was fogged up, all I could see was a blue glow of flashing light.
“Fly” I looked at Mirko. “We have to fly.
Mirko stepped on the gas pedal, he released it and pressed it again as if to increase the speed, but the car did not go any further. We were going a hundred and ten kilometers an hour, I could hear the engine squealing like a pig, the dashboard vibrating.
God, the time has come, see that maritime pine on the right? Let us crash there, let only me die, save Mirko, please.
The police car was behind us, getting closer and closer, passing the maritime pine, even passing my cousin’s junkyard. There were no more trees. We were headed for the highway. A police car drove past us at the entrance and took off to our left. Mirko turned to me with wide eyes and a wide smile. He held out his hand he turned on the radio.
“He won’t take me home,” I said.
Mara Abbafati