November 29, 2012

• Cosgray

  The light in our study was the only light on in our house as well as in the entire neighborhood.  I couldn’t find all the chemistry symbols I needed for my paper and when I did find them I couldn’t get them to format correctly.  For several hours the only sound in the house was the tapping of the keys above the steady hum of the refrigerator.  Outside the pencil thin moon was white but its glow was completely within itself so that when a light shone through the study blinds I knew it was her car in the driveway. 

  The hood of my sweatshirt flopped as I jumped down the concrete steps to our house and she must have seen me as a lunging silhouette against the porch light.  My silhouette got larger until it was by her driver window and I stood still for a few moments until she rolled it down and looked up at me, her face obscured by my shadow. 

  ‘Let’s take my car.’

  Her shoulder jolted as she cranked the window upward.  A second later her engine died.  She got out of her car and dropped her keys in the pocket of her puffy jacket with the fur-lined hood.  She gaited around the back of my Nissan Altima and her door thumped closed as I started the car.  She flattened her hands one against the other and notched them in-between her knees and looked straight ahead as I backed out of the driveway.

  A car or two passed us in the roads lined with neighborhood inlets.  The night sky was dim and far away above the city’s tree lines, like a snow globe that was almost out of uses, but by the time we were surrounded by wheat fields and the stars were brighter the blackness in the sky had hollowed itself out like a yawning whale and we knew we could never get closer to it by driving. 

  The pavement was fresher out where the farmers clung to their ancient lands.  Music played quietly beneath my car’s natural thrum.  The only light below the sky were the frozen headlight shapes groping along the country road before us and the neon green light of the dashboard and radio and clock that glowed against her cheeks and nose.  Next to us the wheat fields were silent and anonymous.  Beyond the sleeping seas of wheat stalks were rows of trees that hemmed in our view of the world.  On the other side of the trees were buildings where our parents would wake up and go to work and scientists who knew how to measure everything and bodies of water too big to fit into a thought and even farther away from us than the stars were politicians sleeping in halls of grandeur and orphans who died in the streets.   

  Sometimes she looked out the window and sometimes she looked straight ahead but it did not feel like she looked at me.  Stop signs were infrequent and at first I stopped at them briefly but soon I stopped at them and stood the car before moving on, like we might turn, or like we were waiting for an invisible train to cross in front of us.  The wheat fields eventually gave way to split-rail fences lining open fields but we didn’t see anything alive in them.  After awhile of the sloping fields undulating on either side of us I turned off the music and we drove in silence for a long time after that.

  We stopped at a small church that sat right by the road and I parked in the lot right in front of the cemetery.  I turned off the car after a few minutes and we listened to its metallic cackling from inside of it.  She opened her door and got out and I did too.  I joined her at the fence which she stood in front of but did not touch with her neck bevelled toward the sky.  We gazed at Alpha Centauri but we didn’t know it was called that and it didn’t know it either.  I don’t know how long we stood there for.  At some point she stared ahead at the graveyard and I looked over at her and watched her but it was sure to me that none of her meanings could be known from her face.

  On the road again my view became close and I watched the plastic wrinkles on the top of the base of the wheel as the car traced the long-winded roads.  There wouldn’t be any deer away from the woods.  I wasn’t driving very fast and there still wasn’t any wind or anything to let us know that the world was still going and would be there for us to come back to.

  ‘Sorry I’ve been weird,’ I said.

  ‘It’s ok,’ she said.

  We wound through bends that hadn’t been there before and by the time the sky had become blue rather than black we were lost.  I used my turn signals at forgotten stop signs and we found a creek by the road that we followed to a street that we knew intersected with the creekside road and when we found it I turned onto it.  It was about twelve or twenty or thirty-five miles on that road until we got home and found the neighborhood street signs again.  We pulled into my driveway and I parked where my parents wouldn’t know I had gone anywhere and I got out and walked her to her car.  She climbed inside and I thought it would be awkward to try to hug her through her driver window.  She held her palm up straight and waved by only using her fingers and I wandered up to the porch as she pulled away.  When I got inside the door I collapsed on the hallway rug and sucked up the dust off the floor until I had the power to heave myself up and crawl up the stairs.

  • 4:43 am
  • 2 Comments