We drove through the cussed state of Missouri. No one followed us. We picked up a hitchhiker, Monkeyboy and his almost empty handle of Jack Daniels. We drove his smelly bare feet 200 miles northwest before he sobered up, began to cry, and ask to be taken home.
Before he did, he took a walk with my wife, while i slept in the driver’s seat. They brough fishing rods and bait. He came back alone. I suppose I should have been worried, but I was just upset that he’d woken me up. He said, “There’s something wrong with your wife, man.” He wouldn’t elaborate. “She’s one fucked up person,” is all he would say.
I just pretended that I loved her and didn’t know what he was talking about. Not about to give up the game as early as all that.
The next day, still in Missouri, we bought whiskey and filled the gas tank while smoking cigarettes indoors and playing slot machines, all in the same three-hundred square foot building. We were bound for Kansas, for openness, or something like that. There was nothing no one was following us for. I looked into the rear view mirror into the vast stretches of nothing behind my hungry eyes, and almost drove us off the road, there into that vacuum.
Laura and me had argued a lot after Monkeyboy set us back an entire day of driving. To my left, green glades blurred, while out her window, a golden savannah undulated against a slate and stormy sky. Large drops spread wide smacked the windshield, signaling a burst, rather than an extended event. The three-point-eight under the engine cowl between us ran on five out of six cylinders and was as untuneable as my guitar with the cracked neck.
Nobody wants to be forgotten the way we inevitably all are. Maybe that’s why we invent gods, to serve as our forever proxies. Sure as the engine was nearing the end of its service-life, we were just beginning ours. Couldn’t tell which way was up though, as the Astro van didn’t have functioning wipers. We needed to get off the highway, yet again. Take cover and wait out the micro-burst.
The exit sign was green and had an arrow, because of course, it was an exit sign. But beyond that all similarity ceased, as it had no number and no name, just one crooked arrow. The ramp pushed up into the lower part of the sky, which had turned from slate to cobble. Beneath the storm, a berm held up the dead-end side of an overpass. Hollowed into the land was a bowl-shaped parking lot, the courtyard of a shuttered motel, and the roots of a gas station, cut back to the height of a curb.
That empty exit ramp still calls to me through the rainy windscreen of dreams and reverie alike, twenty-years hence. This part of me is still there, calling forward and backward along the echoey timeline of my life. I hear him now.
The hot and lonely asphalt was more pulled apart than stuck together and in more places than not by the affordance of clumps of tall grass. Water splashed down from the sky in cold bitter waves that riffled steam off our hood. Those tarmac fractures swelled as the earth beneath swallowed the drink. Our Astro van rumbled to a stop. She looked at me, and I her. I completed the circuit to mostly roll up our windows by touching together three wires sticking out of the arm rest on my door. I stopped short of all the way, and we smoked a cigarette, and I used my inhaler.
“We are nowhere,” I said.
“I thought we were going somewhere,” she countered, turning down the radio. “If you could go to a barbeque with Bill Clinton or George Bush, which one do you think would be more fun?”
“Neither.”
“Just think about it, George Bush would be way more fun. Clinton is too coolguy, and he just seems super-rich, you know? George Bush is like a country boy. He’d probably have mud wrestling at his barbeque.”
“What you’re talking about is just empty appearances though.” Just like that, the rain had stopped and I grabbed the wet wires from the armrest and pressed them together again, this time with the blue wire instead of the yellow one, to roll the windows down again. “Look, at that bird,” I said and pointed at a killdeer feigning a broken wing.
“What’s wrong with it? Did you run it over?” she asked.
“It must have a nest nearby,” I said.
“It needs our help, look,” she said.
“It needs us to leave it alone,” I said, but she was already gone to fetch it.
I stood and urinated on the asphalt from behind the driver’s door. It splashed onto my thongs and bare toes, clammy from the moisture in the air. She came back holding the bird. I couldn’t believe it.
“Her name is Fanny. Get it? Because of her wing.”
“That bird is almost certainly not injured. It’s just sacrificing itself to save its brood. It thinks we are going to eat it.”
“That’s silly,” she said. “We’d never eat Fanny.”
“Why not? You go fishing and eat the fish. Why wouldn’t you catch a bird and eat it?”
“Fanny is not an it. She’s a lady.
I considered my options: the boarded-up motel doors and windows; the stubs of gas pumps; the deteriorating parking lot stripes. “This is our home now. We can’t leave until you’ve nursed Fanny back to health.”
She nodded and kissed the bird on its head. It winced, preparing to be eaten and blinked when it wasn’t.
I put the minivan up on blocks and removed the wheels. We needed to blend in. I stacked all the wheels on the roof, where the tires began to rot in the sunlight. We built a nest of asphalt chunks and wires under the steering wheel. Laura fed Fanny seeds and spiders from her bare hand. I was jealous of her, but kept it cool, knowing that one day, the bird would fly away. Laura would feed me seeds and spiders then, and I would eat them right out of her hand, my beak pecking at her soft skin.
David John Baer McNicholas is an author and designer living in New Mexico.
This is great. You and Matthew perhaps sharing a piece of mental space this month . . . I was along for the journey – trusting that it would take me somewhere unexpected. You had me at Monkeyboy, driving his smelly bare feet and his side fishing trip with the wife. I wanted to know more about that situation but forgot about that when the story kept growing.
“I just pretended that I loved her and didn’t know what he was talking about. Not about to give up the game as early as all that.” Hinting at some whole other story I’d like to read.
“Nobody wants to be forgotten the way we inevitably all are.” Great turn that opens up a new direction – like the line above.
Love the ending – the bird feigning a broken wing . . . maybe.
thank you Dorothy. i feel like your narrator lives in a similar extended purgatory to mine.
David–
I read your piece so many times! Great timing, character development, humor and some horror.
I love that it is intersperced with action and expository writing.
Good job with all the sensory details and colors — lush greens and golds.
Nice turning point at “We are nowhere.”
I could see maybe a little more development in the relationship with Laura and the main character.
And, as Dorothy mentioned, you stuck the landing.
Thanks for sharing this.
thanks Kristen, i agree, Laura needs a little more development
Hi David.
Some favorites…
“Nobody wants to be forgotten the way we inevitably all are. Maybe that’s why we invent gods, to serve as our forever proxies.”
“That empty exit ramp still calls to me through the rainy windscreen of dreams and reverie alike, twenty-years hence. This part of me is still there, calling forward and backward along the echoey timeline of my life. I hear him now.”
And that last paragraph!!
This piece has so much to love and ponder. It really transported me and now a part of me is in that parking lot, is that killdeer.
We are eachother’s stories.
Fantastic!!
thanks Emily, we are all minor characters in someone’s story. glad you enjoyed it
You do an excellent job of building suspense — what’s up with the crazy wife? I am drawn into this flash fiction not just because of the narrative but because of the rich language you use. I’ll single out a few sentences: “I looked into the rear view mirror into the vast stretches of nothing behind my hungry eyes, and almost drove us off the road, there into that vacuum.” “Hollowed into the land was a bowl-shaped parking lot, the courtyard of a shuttered motel, and the roots of a gas station, cut back to the height of a curb.” “I considered my options: the boarded-up motel doors and windows; the stubs of gas pumps; the deteriorating parking lot stripes.”
And then, of course, the dialog (clever, punchy) which keeps it moving and takes the reader from familiar territory into a surrealistic world.
thanks Marjorie, i do love me some surrealism
Hi David, this is another epic journey, and I was along for the ride (hopefully NOT Monkeyboy!!!) Love the poetic prose, the lovely use of nature as tension, the killdeer… ahhh! Growing up on an upstate NY farm, we had multiple killdeer- and they did feign injury to thwart predators from their nests. And I feel even if you knew this, we get the characters to flush out their dialogue about Fanny. There is a David Lynch-ness about this piece. I think it could even up a notch of strange-ness. Embrace the weird!
thanks Robert. fascinating animal, that monkeyboy. haha
Hello David.
I had to read this several times, see it aside a couple days and come back. This read I see a richness in paragraphs of description I’d missed. Earlier, I’d been overwhelmed by the sour reality of the humans.
The conversations are logical. I’m shook bye the ‘I pretended I loved her’ and that still makes me question, yet is the character toying with us – likely!
What I look for is some character balance – and I think that is my failure, as that is not the point of the story. My apologies.
Still, the part of about the killdeer allowing itself to be picked up by the wife and toyed with for days brings critters into the same state of mind as the humans. What killdeer would abandon its babies? …my rationality ruling again.
Much to be admired in my last read of your piece, however. My best. j
Hi David…sorry I’m coming in late with comments. I love this quirky voice and story, and its richness in detail. I can picture the rotting tires on top of the minivan! Suggestions about Laura: in the beginning, when she doesn’t come back with Monkeyboy, you could build on the mystery of where she went….like she’s carrying something, or she’s covered in mud…
David: This is an outstanding scene. I loved how you threw in the para “I just pretended that I loved her…” my mind shifted from placid to the darker edges of Southen Gothic—Flannery O’Connor or the opening chapter of an early Cormac McCarthy novel.
The edginess continues with furtive glances in the rear view mirror. “Monkeyboy set us back.”
“The engine service life” and “which way was up,” keep the reader off-kilter.
Fanny is the coup de grâce. Great narrative. Makes me want more.