Olivia Rogers
The air wields a hollowness as I rumble too slowly to be legal down the eroded road, through the wilderness, with no other cars in sight. I begin to see a pinprick blue twinkling light, like an eye, cresting over the apex of a paved hill, impending in the thick fog. It’s the large lamp over some farmer’s solitary wainscotted storage shed. It’s the flashlight of an honest man who loves beer and the smell of gasoline and who doesn’t mind getting his hands a little dirty and who wonders what delinquent would be out at this hour and who would stand in the road until my tires screeched to a stop and my car flung me forward and who is tired and pissed and primal with fear. It’s the barrel inches from my forehead, gleaming white-hot seconds after branding me with the mark of an invader. It’s the blurry careening light of the train that barrels towards my car after the trees lining the sides of the road constrict around me like the esophagus of a great beast and without warning the asphalt gives way to tracks and I can’t brake or pull over or throw myself from this course, I can only keep driving forward and forward forever. It’s the glow from a corridor promising that the starless sky will be swept quietly away at nearly two a.m. promising the incalculable what-comes-next at its end, and I don’t know what will happen after it’s swallowed me up but I do know that the frigid sheen looks so different from the crisp candlelight my friends and I had huddled closely around while watching the credits of The Nightmare Before Christmas roll across the TV screen before the screen went black and the night deepened into a sleepy warmth and sincere conversation. It’s the moonlight that they will sleep tranquilly underneath for the next eight hours and they won’t know what had become of me until they rub the dreaminess from their eyes and pick up the phones sitting on their bedside tables and see the news glaring noiselessly up at them from blue screens alongside promotional emails and how eight hours before, it had hit me, in my car that had crumpled like a soda can on itself and on my skeleton, that I still felt the shock of the drop of absinthe on my tongue and the phantom my life of all the things I had done and tried and the ache of all the things I had never done or tried because of how I’d let the past haunt me year after year and the futile state of waiting for to begin that the authorities will bag me up with. It’s a burden lifted and a blessing desolated the feeling, the knowing, that I’ve treaded lightly in the lives of those I love. The fog clears slightly, the blurred blue light sharpens and cleaves into two. It’s clear now the lights are simply another person in their car, with their brights on, just trying to get home, like me. They turn off onto another road and disappear out of sight.