Trolley Problem
Everyone thinks they’d save the van full of orphans and shoot their own grandmother, but that’s not how accidents work. I was the bullet once; I know. My son was still young; in his train phase, a thing on springs in his car seat. That bus full of orphans was cutting awful close to the sliced edge of the cliff. Okay, it wasn’t a cliff. It was a semi crossing the median. And they weren’t all orphans—it was a school trip. Fifth grade honors. Allow me one sip of melodrama. I’m grieving.
Yes, I swerved. It was us or the bus. I didn’t even think. I had one job and my body knew it: keep my kid safe. There was no time for ethics. I heard the crash and I kept on driving. I got pulled over for a speeding ticket and a witness statement and I cried but it wasn’t the end of the world. Not for me. My son grew to the age of the children on the bus and then surpassed them. We were so lucky. He grew sullen, secretive, belligerent. Never once an honors student. It didn’t matter. I dreamed about that bus sometimes and woke in gasping sweats, but didn’t tell anyone. I was just grateful. I tried not to think about it.
I did think about it, later, when my son was suspended, arrested, arraigned. I thought about it again when they called me to identify his body. There were eleven kids on that bus. Eleven orphans would have been easier, but no, there were their mothers to think of. Twelve is the divine number of balance, of completeness. A number like that, you gotta wonder about free will. They handed me his effects in a Ziploc baggie when I left the morgue. Not much: used tissues, wallet, vape. And then, from his pocket: a familiar green train, patinaed. Such joy. His whole childhood a soap bubble bursting in my palm.
Sarah Bess Jaffe is a writer, translator, visual artist, and award-winning audiobook producer with 15 years of experience at Penguin Random House. She is an MFA candidate at the Brooklyn Writers Foundry, and has taught at St. Joseph’s University, and Paris College of Art. Her writing appears in Electric Literature, CutBank, Peatsmoke, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a hand-watercolored graphic novel about the rise of the far-right in the US and Europe, and a regular novel with no pictures at all.