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Saturday, November 08, 2003

"A lie can drive halfway around the world while the truth is putting it's shoes on."
- Mark Twain



FICTION:



Glass Car Crash (part 1)



The girl was white-knuckling her steering wheel with her hands crossed at the wrists.

Her eyes wandered down from the vanishing point, down from the road, down to her fingers drumming against the wheel, the shadow of her knuckles the only thing moving inside the car. She imagined that shadow was a huge creature outside on the road, crawling fast down the yellow lines.

No, it was crawling too slow, too slow to keep up with her. She wiggled her fingers faster and her shadow ran to match speed with her wheels. She tried turning down the dashboard lights and that stretched the shadow of her hands out to the perfect length. Her knuckles kept a steady rhythm for several miles, switching hands when the one on top got too heavy. She watched the odometer. It was every nine miles that the weight of her arms where her wrists were crossed on the wheel would start to hurt.

Somewhere away from the city she drove past a burned out church with a glowing sign box out in front. The box was empty and she lifted a foot off the gas to look for letters that might have fallen off into the grass. Or an electrical cord.

Do those thing run on batteries?

Then something dead ran under the shadow of her drumming fingers. She saw a flash of the animal an instant before it was gone under her tire. She felt it in her feet and her fingers slowed down with her car. Another mile and there was another animal in the road ahead, something else that hadn't made it across the yellow lines. She nervously tried to think of some “chicken crossed the road” jokes. The thing approached in her high-beams and suddenly she imagined her drumming fingers running over it. The shadow of her hand running fingers through the wet red fur and disappearing inside the hole where the creature had burst from the pressure of traffic. She never stopped drumming, forcing her drumming fingers to crawl over it anyway. Then she swerved to let it pass between her wheels. She didn’t want to have to step on a roadkill with bare feet too.

When the shadow of her knuckles was forced to crawl over a third creature dead in the road, she wrinkled her nose and jerked her hands off the wheel. She scrubbed her palms on her knees in disgust, then rubbed the sore spots where her wrists had been crossed. She drove on with only the tip of her thumb steering the car from the bottom of the wheel.

Her foot came off the gas.

Eyes had reflected in her headlights. She was suddenly sure that when the eyes could still reflect back headlights or flashlights or fireworks, it meant that it wasn't dead yet. She thought it must have been a cat. Or do the eyes of every animal reflect back at night?

She considered a U-turn, not caring what animal it was, just wanting to know if it had been dead.

Eyes don’t reflect when they’re dead. She thought. That’s impossible. Those are not mirrors in their heads. The lights in the eyes snuff out like jack-o-lanterns smashed in the road on Halloween. . .

She wanted to go back to check the eyes.

She couldn’t. It was too hard to turn the car around with just her thumb.


* * *


When she was thinking about reflections and roadkill and her fingers running out in front of her car, Steven was ten miles down the same stretch of road, looking for a tree.

That crazy tree.

He was always surprised that no other cars were gathered around it. He was always expecting at least one car already there when he found it. He was starting to think that no one could see that tree except for him. Tonight he needed to see it, and this time he swore he draw a map in the dust of his dashboard so he could find it faster next time.

He drove past a glowing sign box outside a church. The letters were gone. His feet came up off the gas. They were cold and waking up with pins and needles. His toes wiggled around in the dead leaves and dirt under his seat, looking for his shoes to hide inside.

That mean one of three things, he thought. The wind blew them off. A man ripped them off. Or I’m driving in circles.

Suddenly he was sure there was a girl in a car, idling next to his tree right now. A perfect girl that he would never see because he couldn’t remember where it was. She’d stop to stare up at it for a while, maybe listen to the radio until she couldn’t find a good song, then she’d drive away. Or maybe she would wait there while the seasons changed and watch every leaf curl and fall to the ground before she drove off. Maybe she would tell herself to wait until the first raindrop turned to ice before she gave up.

Maybe she would do all of these things while he was driving the wrong way. Like a boy chasing the string coming off the baseball and missing the catch, like that poem about the falcon spiraling off into the distance until it couldn’t hear the man with the leather glove anymore, like a needle playing a record backwards. Until it finally screams in protest when the road ends.



-© 2003 david james keaton

::: david - 12:02 PM [+] :::
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