I forget the name of the guy who was driving. I remember his face and his red hair, but I can’t remember his name anymore. The other guy, who was also sitting up front and knew the way, was Red’s friend, but Red didn’t introduce us when we swung by his place to pick him up. So obviously I couldn’t tell you his name either, seeing as I never knew it.

Red was driving like a maniac. His friend kept telling him he knew the way and we’d be on time, but it didn’t make a difference, and Red said if we kept distracting him we’d all wind up in an accident with our faces half scraped off and miss the best part of the party.

So his friend quit giving him advice and started just giving him directions.

We left town and passed through the ugly neighborhoods out east that depress me every time because they remind me of my grandmother with Alzheimer’s.

Then we headed down this bullshit county road that kept turning right and left, I think me and Red’s friend both wanted to hurl. But we were afraid to tell Red to slow down. Besides, it was getting dark and that was making him nervous. To him, all that darkness meant we were definitely going to be late, and there wouldn’t be anything left to eat but cold pizza and a few stupid anchovies.

After a while Red’s friend asked him to pull over so he could check his map.

That drove Red wild. He slammed on the brakes, got out of the car, and started screaming at his friend, who was supposed to have been there before and know the way. His friend replied that he hadn’t come to get yelled at, and he just needed two minutes to check the map or no one was getting to the damn party before dawn.

That didn’t exactly chill Red out, but he shut up and got back in the car. He asked me for a cigarette, I said I didn’t smoke, then he called me a total asshole and said I’d wind up fucking my health over completely by not smoking.

His friend sat back down. “In a mile or so, there’s gonna be a weird tree that looks like a hitchhiker; that’ll be a landmark.”

I said it was so dark we wouldn’t see the tree and that with all this, we were totally going to miss the party.

Red said I was an asshole.

His friend told me to shut up.


After a while we still hadn’t seen the tree. Red was quiet but that didn’t exactly put me at ease. His friend was getting more and more nervous, staring holes into his map, and at one point I thought I heard him mutter a prayer that we’d pass some place he recognized.

I just stared out the window at the fields all black in the night, counting the first fireflies the car sent waltzing past the fences.

“You’re a fucking asshole. You know how much going to this party cost me?” Red said to his friend.

“I bet it hasn’t even started yet,” his friend said quietly.

“I bet they’ve eaten everything already. And it’s all your fault.”

They were yelling at each other when, in the headlights, I saw what looked like a really tall blonde girl trying to hitch a ride.

“Hey,” said Red’s friend, sitting up.

“What?”

“Didn’t you see that, on the side of the road?”

“I didn’t see a thing.”

“It looked like this really tall blonde girl trying to hitch a ride.”

“So?”

“So it’d be nice to give her one.”

“We’re in a hurry, we’re not giving her a thing.”

“But a girl like that could run into some psycho who’d have his own party all over her. We could save her from that.”

“Plus maybe she’s going to the party and she knows the way,” I chimed in.

“Yeah,” said Red’s friend, “maybe she even knows a shortcut.”

So Red finally said all right, we’ll go back and pick her up, but if this blonde held us up he’d ditch us there and go to the party by himself.

We turned around and headed back; Red already seemed to be sorry he’d listened to us. His friend and me kept our eyes on the side of the road for the hitchhiker.

We’d passed the point where I first spotted her without seeing a thing. My blood ran cold; I was already picturing Red hauling us out of the car.

“So where’s your tall blonde now?” Red said in a low voice.

Since we didn’t say anything, he slowed down. “Well, you’re about to try and hitch a ride just like her.”

Then his friend started yelling, “There she is! There she is! We just passed her, she’s back there!”

Red hit the brakes and looked. “Can’t see a thing.”

“That’s ‘cause it’s dark out, I saw her in the headlights, she’s just behind us,” said his friend, getting more and more worked up.

Red was pissed off, but he put it in reverse and started back.

“Uh, you might want to turn around.”

“I’m turned the fuck around!” Just then we heard a muffled thump out back and felt the car rolling over something.

“Shit!” said Red, stopping.

“Shit,” said his friend.

We all got out, Red with a flashlight, and went to check out the rear end. There was nothing, the bumper was just dented a little.

“I thought we ran something over after hitting it.”

Red got down and looked under the car. “Oh, shit. The blonde, I hit the blonde.”

His friend and I got down and saw a tall blonde lying under the car.

“We have to get her out of there,” said Red’s friend, lying down and trying to grab a piece of the girl.

She was in kind of bad shape. She was bent in half all wrong, totally flattened, demolished, except her thumb, which was still stuck out. It was the only thing funny in this picture.

“That’s gross,” said Red’s friend.

Red looked really bad. “So what are you gonna do now? Got any other great ideas to get us in deeper shit?”

“With all this they’re gonna accuse us of doing things to her before knocking her off,” said the friend, who was starting to lose his shit.

“You have a twisted mind,” I told him.

“That’s how cops think. Twisted cops, all cops are twisted. If we call them, we’re screwed.”

“At any rate we’re not gonna waste any more time, because I’ve got a party to get to, and all this bullshit is making me late. So you figure it out, because I’m outta here in two minutes,” said Red.

“Best thing would be to put her in the trunk and we’ll think about it later,” I suggested.

Since Red’s friend seemed OK with that, we opened the truck. The blonde was oddly heavy, and made weird cracking sound like loads of crushed-up girl parts were shifting around inside her.

Once we got her in the trunk, Red’s friend started nosing around the car with the flashlight.

“We can’t leave any clues,” he said. “The smallest thing and they’ll follow the trail all the way to us.”

I saw him checking the ground, sometimes getting down for a closer look.

I was starting to get sick of this shit. It was dark and cold and I didn’t like that. But Red’s friend had scared me with all that stuff about cops, so I started checking the ground, too.

A few yards away I found a lock of blond hair, which I stuffed in my pocket.

I wasn’t seeing anything else suspicious when suddenly Red’s friend started howling, “A PIECE OF TITTY! THERE’S A PIECE OF TITTY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD!”

Red, who was sitting in the car, yelled back that in a second he was out of here, titty or no.

I walked over to his friend and saw the white thing at his feet.

“Can you believe it? She left her titty in the middle of the road.”

So I looked at it, and told him he was losing his shit, since it wasn’t a titty but a chick’s purse, the little round kind. I got back in the car. The friend followed me, holding the purse with a grossed-out look.


“Now she can’t show us the way even if she knows it,” Red said.

“Maybe she had a map on her,” I said.

Red turned around and stared at me, furious. “You want to get her out of the trunk and pat her down for a map?”

“Well…yeah.”

“Get it through your head: that girl got run over by a car with the three of us in it. Do you have any idea what it’d be like to search a body in that condition? The thought of getting a lady’s blood all over my hands like that makes me want to hurl.”

“We don’t have to search her. If she had a map, it’d be in her purse,” said Red’s friend, suddenly sitting up.

“You think a blonde like that puts a map in a purse? A bitch like that, her purse is for a spare pair of pantyhose and colored pencils for her face for when she goes to the bathroom. If she had a map, she’d keep it in a pocket or she’d have lost it long ago,” Red said.

His friend opened the purse anyway and rummaged around.

“Well?”

“Nothing. Not even a pair of pantyhose. Just a box of mints and her ID, that’s all. Her name was Minitrip.”

“A chick with bad breath,” I said.

The friend passed out mints to me and Red, then took one for himself.

The mint taste mingled with the country night and made me feel like it was the middle of winter. I shivered, and thought that sucking on a dead girl’s mints really didn’t get you much.


The car sped down the little country road. Now it was completely dark. A few luminescent bugs fluttered along the side of the road, making like they wanted to follow the car. I thought bugs that flew along after cars must be kind of like dolphins for truck drivers.

Red’s friend didn’t look good. He’d finished the box of mints in no time at all, and was now all hunched up in his seat waiting for his friend to jump on him.

For one thing, it was starting to get really late now; you could feel it in the air. The feeling was getting on Red’s nerves, because he was probably thinking he was in the process of completely missing this party he’d shelled out so much for.

All of a sudden, he stopped by the side of the road.

The cloud of luminescent bugs stopped too, making figure eights over us.

Red got out of the car and opened his friend’s door.

“Get out,” he told him.

His friend got out.

Then he came over and opened my door. “You get out, too. I want one of you to get the girl out of the trunk and see if she’s got a map.”

I wasn’t too big on the idea, especially since I saw no reason why I should do it.

Red and I turned on the friend.

“You want me to get that dead girl from the trunk and search her? That’s the grossest thing I’ve ever heard. There’s no way I’ll be able to do that, have you seen the state she’s in? She’s so ugly I can’t even look at her.”

“It’s your fault this whole night got fucked up, so you’re the one who has to do it,” Red told his friend.

“Yeah, you had to get us lost,” I added, since I had no desire to lay my hands on the girl either.

I thought the guy was going to cry. We waited for him to make up his mind to get the girl out. He finally realized standing around out here in cold making a fuss about it wasn’t going to help his case, and headed around back, cussing out our mothers.

Red lit a cigarette leaned on the hood. I shifted from one foot to the other, watching the phosphorescent bugs make electroencephalograms above the fences.

We heard the guy pull the girl from the trunk and let her drop on the ground.

Red was making these amazing smoke rings.

Then we heard his friend scream. “Shit, shit, shit, she’s not dead, SHE’S NOT DEAD!”


Minitrip was seated on the ground, her butt in a puddle of blood.

We were all standing around her. Red, who was even more furious than before, and his friend, who was scared stiff.

Without noticing our presence, she was swaying back and forth with little movements like a broken watch, blood dripping from her everywhere, and her hair sticking to her face.

“She looks shaky,” I said.

Red decided to speak to her.

“Miss?” he said.

But the girl kept swaying back and forth.

“Maybe she’s crazy,” said the friend.

“You’d have to be crazy to go hitching alone at this hour,” I said.

Red wasn’t giving up. “We’re looking for a party that’s supposed to be somewhere around here.”

The girl rocked without answering.

“She’s crazy.”

“She’s totally lost it,” said his friend.

“Yeah,” I said. “A real loony.”


The fireflies had left for other phosphorescent adventures, taking their strobelight frenzy with them.

I had the impression the ambiance had fallen a few notches as a result. The girl had stopped to-and-froing, and now sat there unmoving, her ass in the blood.

Red made a face that said a great deal about the state of his mood, while his friend, I think, would rather have been turned into a watermelon than be there.

“We’ll have to take her to the hospital,” I said.

“Yeah, great idea. That way when she starts talking she’ll say we flattened her first and then we threw her in the trunk and then we pulled her out to steal her stuff,” said the friend.

I had to admit he wasn’t far off, and this whole business was starting to stink.

So there we were, wondering what to do with this hitchhiker when Red walked around to the front of the car and came back with the jack.

“Well, I don’t want any part of her.” And raised the jack and brought it down on her several times.

It made a soft noise, and she began to scream, holding her head. He hit her for a while, without result.

“I can’t believe how thick her skull is.” Then he added something, but we couldn’t hear what because the girl, who’d been so quiet, wouldn’t stop screaming now.

“She needs to stop. She needs to stop, now,” Red’s friend kept saying over and over again.

I figured if we hadn’t started hitting her in the face with the jack like that, she would never’ve started screaming.

So Red asked me if I really wanted to wind up in jail because of some girl who couldn’t even hitch a ride right.

I didn’t say anything; I knew he was right, and we had to get this over as soon as possible.

“Best thing to do is run her over again,” said Red.


I grabbed Minitrip by the legs, and Red’s friend took her arms.

She’d stopped screaming for a second, but now she started howling even louder, like she suspected we were about to do her a bad turn.

We laid her out on the ground in front of the car.

Of course, ever since the jack, the girl didn’t want to stay down anymore, and she kept getting up only to sit back down and shield her head with her hands.

Red’s friend kicked her so she’d stop moving, but that only got her more worked up. I tried to strangle her in turn. She seemed to pass out. She remained still, not screaming or wriggling anymore.

Red blinked the lights to tell us he was getting impatient. We laid the hitchhiker across the road and got back in the car.

Red started up and drove toward the girl.

All white and blonde like that, with red stains all over her clothes, she looked like a little trapeze artist from the circus. The headlight beams were like the spotlight, and the three of us in the car were the audience.

The car rolled over Minitrip, we felt a little bump; I told myself the trapeze artist had smashed her face in, for good.


“This time we’re leaving her there,” said Red. “Girls get run over every day.”

“It should even happen more often. Less trouble for us,” his friend replied.

Then they started to laugh. Me, too.

After a shitty night like that, it’s nice to be able to relax a little. 

 

©Editions Julliard, Paris, 1997

# # #

There Was Something We Didn't See in the Dark by Thomas Gunzig (Edward Gauvin, translator)
originally published in the Summer 2012 print edition

 

 


Thomas Gunzig has written eleven books of short stories, three novels, two plays, and two works for younger readers. His 2001 novel Mort d’un parfait bilingue won Belgium’s top literary prize, the Prix Rossel; his most recent novel is the slasher parody 10,000 Liters of Pure Horror (Diable Vauvert, 2007). The son of a noted cosmologist, he is known for his dark humor, absurdism, and the time he challenged editor Luc Pire, a Tae Kwon Do red belt, to a duel at the Brussels Book Fair over the rights to one of his own story collections. He won.

For more of Thomas' work,
visit his Big Pulp author page

Edward Gauvin (translator) has received fellowships and residencies from the NEA, the Clarion and Fulbright Foundations, the Centre National du Livre, Ledig House, the Banff Centre, and ALTA. His work includes A Life on Paper by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud (Small Beer, 2010) and publications in F&SF, Podcastle, Postscripts, Joyland, Conjunctions, Subtropics, World Literature Today, Epiphany, Tin House, The Southern Review, and the Harvard Review. The winner of the John Dryden Translation prize, he is the contributing editor for Francophone comics at Words Without Borders, and translates comics for Tokypop, First Second, Lerner, and Archaia.

For more of Edward's work,
visit his Big Pulp author page

 

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