driving & injured foot

I was waiting for my sister to come home from work. I waited all night, sometimes sleeping, sometimes reading or rearranging the items of clothing strewn across the bed, but to no avail. In the morning, I woke to find that she was still out, missing from her bed. I went out looking for her and didn't go far before I saw her, walking back home with a few other women who obviously worked with her. They said goodbye and I went to talk with her, to find out where she had been. I didn't want to be angry as I could see that she was happy, but I told her that she had missed our date to travel north. We were due to leave last night. Next she, several members of her family and my brother, prepared to drive through the streets of Newcastle. We packed a ute with what we needed, including various bunches of herbs that we threaded through the metal cages that filled the ute tray. My brother had hurt his foot but insisted that he was alright, that he would tend to it when we arrived at our destination. We began our drive but soon I realised that my sister was napping in the back seat and nobody drove - the ute was freewheeling along the streets. I yelled, asking someone who knew how to drive the ute, and my nephew responded, only he stood on the passenger side and steered a little, not taking full control of the vehicle. I decided to give it a go. I sat down in the driver's seat and adjusted the seat so that I could reach the pedals. I steered the great ute up the road in peak hour traffic, learning quickly how to touch it to get the best response. I asked the others where we were meant to be going but was answered with vague replies. I then realised that we needed to get my brother to a hospital, that he was more critically injured than he originally let on. The traffic was thick so I pulled over into the entrance of a church to ring an ambulance and to look at his foot. He handed his foot to me - it was no longer attached to his leg, and it was sliced in two horizontally across the entire foot, from toes to heel. I opened the foot out and could see that lots of grass and foliage was stuck to the flesh from when we had been packing the ute. Tiny herb leaves were also plastered against the raw, pink foot. I began to carefully pluck the leaves and grass bits from the flesh, doing my best to clean it up before the ambulance arrived. I wished that we had attended to it earlier, and was terribly anxious about the likelihood of saving the foot. As I pulled the foliage from the foot, I simultaneously removed the herbs from the ute, pulling them out of the cages and discarding them.