"Closer Than They Appear" by Cary Rainey
It covers the four lanes of Highway 31 and the median separating the two sets of lanes, and that’s about it, and normally I would be nailing the accelerator right now, but it’s been snowing since before sunrise, and although this is Alabama and little or none of it seems to be sticking, I can’t just nail it here. I ease the gas pedal toward the floor, slowly, and the car picks up a little speed, and I’m wondering again what kind of name Garfunkel is. I can’t see her, but Melanie is in her baby-seat in the back seat. She’s being very quiet, which isn’t unusual, but it’s the kind of hard, heavy quiet that makes me think she’s asleep and not just keeping to herself. I’ll look for her in the rearview mirror in just a second, as soon as I get across the overpass and I’m on solid land again.
Solid land.
The idea seems kind of ridiculous to me right now because I haven’t been on solid land in a long time.
I’ve fully left the onramp now, and the rear tires are about to bump over the gap between solid land and bridge, and the snow is hitting the windshield and melting and once I’m on solid land again, I’ll take a look in the rearview to make sure Melanie’s okay, and then I’ll drive to Danny’s house and that’s going to be that. The end of the road. Danny won and now, just because Danny just shoveled out a few more bucks and actually got a lawyer worth a shit, I’m going to cross this overpass and drive to his house and hand our daughter, my daughter, over to him.
Fucking retarded jerk.
It was like, just the blink of an eye and everything had crumbled. It wasn’t even “right before my eyes” because I didn’t see it happening at all. I didn’t know what happened and I still don’t. Not really. We were on the way to being the people we should have been, the people we were meant to be. We were young and we were in love and it wasn’t just the will-o’-the-wisp glow of adolescent emotion so many young girls fall prey to and build their lives around only to find out, sometimes sooner and sometimes later, that it was just a stinking illusion. It wasn’t the false, hollow love girls sometimes find with boys who think just because you’re a girl, you have to be this kind of thing for them to use and it wasn’t the clumsy, awkward, endearing crap you see in movies. It was exactly how I used to imagine it would be when I was younger and I would while away my nights and my weekends sitting on my bed or on the floor in my bedroom, singing along with the songs on the radio and thinking about (writing poems and songs about, drawing pictures of) a better world, long before I had come to know any of those boys who thought they could just use girls and throw them away like trash, long before I had any real reason to close my eyes and sing along to the songs on the radio and think about what a better world would be like. I know I must have come up with thousands of different ways for me to find the right boy, but when it happened, when I realized it was happening right before my eyes, they all slid away into thin air and I haven’t ever been able to remember any of them since.
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