Cherry - S01 E26

Story 1 year ago

Cherry - S01 E26

Read Story: SEASON 1 EPISODE 26

The last 24 hours were mostly spent with the Love of my life and I was in an amazing place emotionally. At the same time, I was still troubled about the loss of Katie. My thoughts alternated at random between the two as I drifted off to sleep.

I found myself walking along an all too familiar road. Up ahead stood a girl facing away from me and I knew who she was before I got to her, she wore a yellow sundress. As I reached her, I stopped next to Katie.

Without needing to look at her I said, "Hello, Katie." I could sense her look up to me and she said, "Oh, hello David." We stood before "the intersection" and I said, "Why are you here? Wouldn't you rather be somewhere else?"

Katie took my hand and said, "Yeah. don't like it here. This needs to be different; it looks scary this way."

I looked down to see her face and she looked up at me again. For the first time, her eyes looked normal to me. They were deep brown like her hair that was blowing lazily in the breeze. Seeing her eyes with life behind them for the first time gave me an anew sense of the tragic loss.

I looked back at the intersection and agreed, "It is scary, you're right. And it definitely needs to be different."

Katie asked me, "Can you do it? Make it different?"

I shook my head saying, "No, that's not what I do. Remember? I'm just a fireman."

Katie said, "I remember." After a few moments she asked, "Do you know someone that knows how to make roads different?" I thought for a moment and said, "I might be able to find

someone." "You should try," she suggested. I said, "I'm going to find someone to fix this; I promise."

Katie hugged my arm and moments later, she was gone. I woke up to see it was still the middle of the night. Not wanting to forget the

dream before morning, I wrote notes to myself and went back to sleep.

I had another dream, but this time it was about Cherry-and much more pleasant. The dreamed focused around the possible pregnancy we were facing together, but there was never a moment that said definitively that she was either positive or negative-just as the results were to be revealed to us, something would happen to stop us from getting the information we sought.

Unable to sleep in (even though it was a Saturday), I got up early and went straight to my computer. After a brief search online, I found that, as luck would have it, there would be a town hall meeting next Wednesday. I would be there: I had a mission.

I got dressed (still without having a shower), grabbed my HD camera, and went for a drive. I was going to "the intersection", but this time it wasn't about my work-it was about my mission and the promise I made to a little girl in my dreams. I parked my car on the side of the road and got out before getting to work. I started taking pictures of the intersection from every angle imaginable; pictures approaching the intersection from both roads and both directions; pictures at the intersection showing blind spots and possible optical illusions that could cause a driver to miscalculate the speed or distance of a vehicle.

When I was satisfied that I had enough photos to document the intersection, I went home and got back on the computer. I did a satellite search and found the view of the area from directly above. I saved the image to disk and took it with me to have a large print made.

With the collected materials in hand, I began putting together a presentation of the problem; it was so easy even I was able to do it! It infuriated me that no one else had done this before now. It occurred to me that perhaps they knew it was a problem but just didn't know what to do about it (or worse, didn't care).

Knowing that it did little good to simply point out a problem and have no solution to offer, I began trying to work out how to fix the intersection. By no stretch of the imagination was I a civil engineer and the solution was evading me. Putting in an overpass only served to move the problem further up the road. There was already a light there and it was clear that was not enough. Signs did little or nothing to alert drivers not paying attention.

My project was beginning to frustrate me when my phone rang. It was Cherry calling to FaceTime with me. I took the call (of course) and she was still lying in bed.