Unfreeze.

The tires of the 1999 Prelude kick up dust of the gravel road. Logan’s drive home from work at the liquor store to his divorced mother’s house is usually about twenty minutes. But, it will be a long twenty minutes tonight. The rural roads are always empty but the stillness tonight is unreal.
Logan runs his fingers through his shaggy, dirty blonde hair. His foot reaches for the brake pedal as a stop sign is illuminated by his head lights. Silly isn’t it? A stop sign in the middle of nowhere when nobody is around.
The car slows but doesn’t stop and the wheels keep rolling through the stop sign. The pickup truck’s headlights from the left appear only a second before the glass of Logan’s driver seat window shatters into a million pieces and the Prelude is hit… hard.



The dull beep of the alarm clock startles him.
Logan rubs his eyes and stretches his arms above his head, like a cat who’s just woken up from a nap. He looks around this bedroom, foreign to him. Logan swings his legs over his bed and saunters over to a vanity mirror across the room.
Logan runs his fingers through a grey mop of hair atop his head. The wrinkles on his face give him the appearance of a 60 year old man. The dark circles under his eyes would leave one to believe he hadn’t slept in months. Logan does not recognize his reflection in the mirror.
Tears run down the old man’s face.
Logan’s subconscious takes him out of the bedroom and into the room that most closely resembles a kitchen. The sun has just risen and the rays shine through the one musty window in the room.
Bottles and bottles of liquor line the counter, Logan recognizes them marked with a stamp from the store he works at. Now Logan remembers that the man in the mirror this morning had been in the store just two days earlier. Logan finds it strange that he would dream himself in this man’s body.
He involuntarily uncaps the leftmost bottle on the counter which Logan recognizes as a Jack Daniel’s. Logan doesn’t drink? Why is he unscrewing a bottle of alcohol? As he lifts the bottle and takes a sip, Logan doesn’t resist his “new” body’s demand. He figures, why not drink, this is all a dream anyways.
That bottle goes down quickly and leaves an uneasy feeling in Logan’s stomach. He spends most of the day in and out of consciousness drinking then passing out. Drinking some more than passing out again.
Logan awakes from an episode but before he reaches for a new bottle, he notices the window is no longer glowing with sunlight.
His drunkenness is muting what is left of what Logan remembers about his old self: the boy who never drank a drop because his mother told him stories of his alcoholic fathers outbursts. They divorced because of it but Logan never knew him, nor did he want to know him.
This drunk, old, unrecognizable man that is Logan stands up from the floor of the kitchen where he has been sitting since early morning. He grabs keys from the hook next to the door and stumbles to the Ford parked outside. He is shaky putting the keys in the ignition, he is so drunk.
Only God knows where he is going.
The rural roads are empty and Logan drives the pickup fast, faster, faster. The Honda comes out of nowhere and just before the impact, time freezes.
The man in the pickup looks at the man in the Prelude. His headlights illuminate the figure of a young man. He has a full head of dirty blonde hair, a youthful innocence. The man in the pickup looks at him with pride. He looks at him the way a father looks at his son.

Unfreeze.