One Risk Too Many
Anonymous

This story first appeared in an Australian newspaper on New Year’s Eve, 1977. Efforts have been made to trace the copyright holder without success. We trust that they would give permission for us to reproduce the story, so that young people today can also hear the message.

One of us will die tonight. It will be an ugly death. It will be a useless death. You probably won’t give a damn.

How can I make the death of an accident victim mean anything more than a statistic or newspaper headline to you?

How can I show you the bibs of vomit the drop off dead passengers, ejected from their bellies in suffocating fear as their last act of consciousness?’

How can I peak of the urine that stains the clothes of the dead? Because that is the way we humans die.

Urinating in fear. Blood, urine, vomit and grog – they are the last rites of the average crash victim.

Then there are the screams, the song of the wounded dying and the dead.

My own mind is scarred with such horrors. Do not suppose it melodrama. It is a perversity committed on life that can never be captured ruthlessly and honestly on paper.

I remember working one New Year’s night, the radio cackled into life. A car had rammed into a tree. Two passengers, one male, one female. The male was dead; the female though to be dying .What confronted me is to this day a recurring nightmare. I cannot even share it easily with myself.

The car had been concertinaed to half its normal size. The occupants still trapped inside.

The girl slumped on her dead companion’s chest. He had his arm around her. His arm was raised and pinned up by the deformed metal.

The arm was thus in a drinking position and the hand held a beer bottle. The bottle was rammed down his throat.

Slivers of glass had sliced through his throat. The neck of the bottle protruded form the base of his own neck.

His eyes were open. They were white with fear. And they were white with death. They were white with the eyes of an animal shot in the head at point-blank range.

I vomited. I could smell their blood and I could smell the alcohol. The night destroyed me. I had thought they were invincible – the young ones. I had thought death crept only into upstairs bedrooms to close the eyes of the aged. I never stopped to think it hurtled into trees at 100kms.

I never stopped to think of mothers drowning in hysteria, being brought to identify their dead children, beating their chests and pulling their hair.

The mother of this boy did. The car crashed only a couple of hundred meters from his home. A nosy neighbour at the scene of the accident went and phoned her .She came running down the street like a woman possessed .She bit and fought with the ambulance people. She wanted to tear the bottle from his throat.

She was screaming. And screaming. She couldn’t understand why her son wouldn’t answer her; take the bottle out himself. She seemed not to notice his throat was cut. And that he was dead. Her mother’s heart had punctured her mother’s eyes. He was buried with most of the bottle still in his throat.

The night destroyed her. The night will last a lifetime. But this is a pantomime of death we repeat nightly. The longest running show on earth with a willing cast of thousands.

Like drunken lemmings we drink and drive, drink and drive.

Sometimes the guilty kill themselves. More often they kill the innocent. We are impervious todeath. Because we are protected from its obscenities.

We don’t see the casualty sections of our hospitals that sometimes look like the inside of abattoirs. We don’t see the contents of the cranium spilling out onto pillows. We don’t see accident victims twitching in the throes of death. Life force diminishing.

We are happy to be our own butchers, our own murderers. We are happy to premeditate the killing of innocent people.

We are happy to drink to excess and jump behind the wheel of a car, as potent as a weapon as a machine gun.

And if we survive the evening we are happy to sit own to dinner the next evening and tut-tut over the carnage of strife or war in far away parts of the world.

So long as we don’t see the torn flesh and see the severed limbs bleeding in their twisted, steel tombs we’re all right. So long as we don’t see bodies being pulled like broken puppets from car wrecks or shovelled off the asphalt we’re all right.

Leave it to the ambulance teams to handle those thankless, lifeless corpses. They are the people who keep anger as well as tears for this senseless killing.

It is not tasteful for television news reels to record the moans and screamings of the injured. It’s not tasteful for newspaper photographs to feature corpses at accidents. Its not tasteful to write about it. Who wants to read about it? We all know it goes on.

What we need is some bloody tastelessness! You need to hear the scrams. You need to see the dead sprawled open legged, open mouthed and without dignity on our roads. You need to see blood spurting, broken children who will never be mended, who will never grow up, cut down by drunkards.

You need to visit the abattoirs that we call casualty sections .You need to understand that it COULD and WILL happen to you if you don’t take care.

You need to understand that you have no right to jeopardise yourself or anyone else and that if you do you are culpable as anyone who lies in wait to kill. You need to understand you do not have the right.


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One Risk Too Many
Anonymous

Theme:

1. What audience is this story aimed at? (Age/sex)
2. Quote the lines which suggest that this incident is only one of the incidents this Ambulance Officer has attended.
3. The writer describes in detail only one incident. Why was this incident more haunting than the others he must have attended?
4. What is the writers intention in writing this story?
5. How has this story changed the way you think about drunk drivers?

Style:

1. The first four sentences in the first paragraph are very short. Why? What effect does this have on the reader?
2. What do these metaphors suggest?
a. Bibs of vomit
b. The last rites
c. The song of the wounded
d. Car had been concertinaed
e. Death crept only into upstairs bedrooms
f. Twisted steel tombs
g. A willing cast of thousands
3. Find three examples of similes in this story
4. Find an example of where the writer has used a list of adjectives to create an effect of crisis
5. Give some examples where the writer has used repetition to create effect
6. Explain how the writer uses the five senses to make his writing vivid: (Give examples)
a. Sight
b. Hearing
c. Touch
d. Taste
e. Smell

One Risk Too Many
Vocabulary




Abattoirs
Asphalt
Carnage
Concertinaed
Confronted
Corpses
Cranium
Culpable
Deformed
Dignity
Ejected
Hurtled
Impervious
Invincible
Jeopardise
Lemmings
Melodrama
Obscenities
Pantomime
Perversity
Potent
Premeditate
Protruded
Puppets
Recurring
Rites
Ruthlessly
Severed
Slivers
Strife
Tasteful


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