The ambulance ride

Date: 3/11/2019

I was at a dingy and dusty thrift store looking around. My sister really wanted a certain ET Beanie Baby but I couldn’t find one. My dad approached me and told me my grandparents were both in the hospital in the ICU about to go through surgery. We went home. At home, my parents told me that my grandpa was recovering well but my grandma was losing a lot of blood and that the medical bills for her would cost a lot. I wondered whether if she died, my grandpa would lose the will to live and die right after. He’d always been dependent on her. Making things more stressful, we were just about to go on a big trip as a family. I started packing for that. When I had finished packing I went with my dad to ride in an ambulance. The ambulance was going to transfer my grandma from the hospital in Lincoln to my local hospital. There was a perky woman in there, a health care worker, and a female driver who was sitting way in the back of the ambulance (I guess she could see the road via mirrors or a camera). Once the ambulance started the drive to Lincoln I noticed my dad had taken along a backpack for me but it was an old ugly one I had in middle school. I got mad at him and started whining about him bringing an ugly backpack for me. I was being an asshole. The perky woman in the ambulance started arguing with me. She said “Why don’t you calm down, sing a song, and make some arts and crafts?” I said “That would just make me angrier right now.” The woman started singing Christmas carols and did not stop. She was really annoying but I decided to just shut up at that point. I noticed the ambulance was moving erratically as we crossed a bridge and got to a railroad crossing. The driver pushed onward even as the arms of the crossing went down and the warning lights started blinking. The front of the ambulance made it through but a speeding train clipped the back end, where the driver was. We all got out and I ran down the road because I didn’t want to see what happened. I ran to a nearby train platform and paced around nervously, accidentally stumbling onto the tracks several times. There was a group of girls blithely taking selfies near the accident scene and a little girl who kept trying to jump on the back of the train. From my faraway position I could see my dad carrying away the driver’s lifeless body.