None of us wanted to get there. My father and mother in the front seat. In the back seat, us kids were thinking of ways to slow it down.
My sister, Little Peg, said “ooh, let’s count the gas stations.” But, of course, most of them were gone after the bomb hit.
“Let’s count trees,” my brother, Little Martin, said. He was thinking, of course, of the lone tree back on our lawn, the one where the dog growled the cat into the branches that were leafless even into June.
“Shh,” my mother told him, “There are no more trees, remember?”
“Oh yeah,” Little Martin said, holding his arm up to the window, fingers spread like an oak.
“We should turn around, go home.” My mother said to my father. “You know how silly this all is.”
My other sister, Tiny Betty, squished between our elbows. She kept saying, “I wish, I wish, I wish our summer place will still be there.”
The empty highway. The other cars we couldn’t hear anymore
Francine Witte is the author of four poetry chapbooks and two full-length collections, Café Crazy and The Theory of Flesh from Kelsay Books. Her flash fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologized in the most recent New Micro (W.W. Norton) Her novella-in-flash, The Way of the Wind has just been published by Ad Hoc Fiction, and her full-length collection of flash fiction, Dressed All Wrong for This was recently published by Blue Light Press. She lives in New York City.