Free Cage's Bend by Carter Coleman

headlights comes through the windshield. The cops get inside. The van pulls away and I fall on my ass. I scoot across to the mesh screen and stand up, hunching over, my head scraping the roof.
    “I’m sorry I hit your colleague. I was out of my head. I’m kind of confused these days. Will y’all apologize for me?”
    “Shut the fuck up,” the driver says.
    The big one says, “Heat up the grill.”
    We turn onto the highway into town and the driver floors the car, goes through the gears like he’s in a drag race, sending me sliding backward until I hit the rear metal doors with a loud crash, then he slams on the brakes until I’m rolling forward, head over heels, the tires screeching against the road, and my face smacks into the mesh, the little cop yelling,
Waffled!
and the world is starbursts of red and yellow, the big one’s deep belly laugh and the little one’s nasal cackle, the grind of the accelerating transmission, then the heavy thud of my back hitting the floor. I can’t breathe, my lungs stunned, paralyzed. I skid slowly on my back until my head nudges the rear doors and still my jaw jerks my mouth open and shut like a fish in a dry bucket gasping for water. I must have landed wrong on the handcuffs, snapping the spinal link to my lungs, like pulling a plug from an electrical socket. Dizzy, my brain begins to suffocate.
    Everything is clear and simple, though here in the ultimate moment it remains impossible to declare if this end derived from fate or free will. Now is the time for my last thoughts but it’s hard to think at all with the vacuum beneath my ribs on the edge of exploding, so I struggle for perspective and see: I’m dying from a freak accident in a police van driven by two utter strangers, the first fatality of the Nantucket waffle treatment. The absurdity of my death strikes me as so funny my chest and knees jackknife together in a convulsion that yanks me up off the floor, and a last laugh escapes my throat with no sound. And then there is air.
    My head is spinning from careening from one side of the road to the other, banging from starboard to port and back. I lie curled like a bruised, manacled fetus, timing my kicks to stop the sides from slamming me. When I miss, the wheel well punches me on the forehead. The doors open before I know that we’ve stopped. I lift my head and see two dark figures, like Klansmen in black robes, blurry in the square of yellow light, speaking a foreign language. One reaches toward me and drags me by the scruff of the neck out of the van and holds me upright. He barks something in Russian and lets go of my collar. I find myself sprawling in grass at his feet, choking back a rising tide of vomit then hurling it all up on one of his leather shoes.
    “You slimebag motherfucker.”
    They’re speaking English after all. The shoe jerks away.
    “I’ll kick the fucker’s teeth out.” The little cop’s voice.
    “Not in front of the station,” says the big one, lifting me from behind.
    The world clicks back into focus in the fluorescent light inside the station. I see for the first time the faces of the two men apprehending me, like escorts to hell who have no connection to you and will never see you again. A new watershed moment in my life. Like graduating from college. A rite of passage. The big one dumps me on a chair and says, “Lieutenant, here’s the crazy carpenter that kicked out the squad car window.”
    The lieutenant’s ruddy bald head rises up slowly from behind the counter, a cobra out of a basket, followed by his powder-blue pleated uniform shirt. I’m sure I met him at a clambake last month and strain to remember his name. He looks at me with a bored, deadpan expression, then recognition flickers through his eyes and he says, “The guitar player from New Orleans.”
    “Baton Rouge,” I manage. “How you doing?”
    “Fair to middling.” He squeezes a pin in his fist and taps it lightly on the counter, concern beginning to animate his