Unspeakable Horror!

"Car Crash Detectives" originally appeared in The Harrow: Original Works of Fantasy and Horror. 

The film opens
with our overweight car crash detectives
examining another smoking wreckage,
depressed from witnessing the Jaws of Life
retrieve too many mangled corpses.

Montage of crash test experiments.
Dismemberment.
The audience imagines themselves in those seats.
The interstate plugged up with lookie-lous.
Speeding ambulance.
Face collision with windshield.
Fragmentation.
Nose of vehicle punched in.
Decapitation.
The bloody arm sticking out the roadside coffin
of steel and glass.

The midnight interstate collision.
The body is missing, shouts the detective.
And the bodies of the family in the station wagon:
no life ending injuries,
but no blood,
only throat mutilations,
all strapped in with pale mannequin faces
under the handkerchiefs of the detectives.
The car crash detectives return to idyllic nuclear families,
despite the obsession with car crashes strangling their hearts.

The pattern emerges:
what now appears to be homicide,
but how could the perp survive
the willful head-on collision with holiday travelers?

Look here:
fingerprints in blood on the severed head.

The first witness on the scene
mumbles words
like pieces of broken glass
dropping one by one
from his shattered psyche.

In finger-painting therapy,
he drew the horrible shadow sucking on the stump.

Reconstruct the accident with model cars and flashbacks:
the perp in the Buick waits behind the billboard
under the moon,
steps on the gas.
Head on collision with the family.
Somehow the perp exits the Buick,
worms into the wreckage
where no rescuer can reach and
feeds on the spilling wounds.

What we have here is a vampire,
say the car crash detectives,
and the rest chuckle but second-guess.

It seeks out the detectives' families
who encounter the impact
and the subsequent spider web constraint
of their seat belts:
the jagged glass teeth
and the shadow
coiling itself around the precious wives and children
to slurp warm mammalian hemorrhage.

The car crash detectives lose their families,
ruin their careers pursuing a vampire
the papers call urban legend.

The detectives build cabins together in the forest,
abandon cars to rust in retrospect,
never speak of the past,
and dream of car accidents.