They were raked across great spreading fields and distances,
they felt: there’s an intense feeling of instinctive fear,
driving between the sheer cliff faces of mountains that were blown
away in return for roads.

And in the car, for hours, they don’t speak a word and listen to NPR
and awful overplayed indie music and those songs from the 90’s that
were really catchy and no one ever forgot? They logged thousands of
miles all along a quarter of the continent.

When they do talk he tries to impress her by telling her about his
academic pursuits, but she is unimpressable. She is impressive and
thus unimpressable. She knows the following things like the back of
her hands:
• the importance of riding side saddle
• how she secretly hates doing the dishes
• what everyone should be laughing about, really
• learning to be alone

Whereas he knows simpler things, like how everyone has been baptized
whether they like it or not, and how people constantly take liberty with
other people’s liberties, and how to build tiny cotton candy machines and
chocolate cakes in mugs, for days when she’s all down and surrounded
and crowded. With enough tiny cotton candy she doesn’t even hit him
upside the head and outside the belly.

So he drives when she’s tired of driving and he laughs off her constant
criticisms and he tells her about how people find the flavor of l-glutamate
delicious but really l-glutamate only tastes delicious in things that are dead,
and cooked, and rotting, and so that’s what we all love, the taste of decay,
and she says SHUT UP JUST SHUT UP DEAR GOD.

They saw a church van crashed into the ditch on the side of the road in the
flatlands right before Appalachia, and laughed and laughed and laughed.
They spotted spotted deer, and licked their lips. They tried to tell each other
poetry but she can’t ever remember any and anyway who cares.

They find conversation a glorious glorious hindrance, the sort of thing that
takes way too much attention and effort, like picking the quail from between
tiny quail bones. They stress each other out and know that stress inhibits the
formation of new neurons, but they aren’t concerned regardless.

In the end there’s a place in the middle of a valley where they sleep in a friend’s
basement and he kills spiders for her. The outside is nests of yellow-jackets and
calf-high grass, and their insides are a mess of winding roads.

09/20/2010

Posted on 09/20/2010
Copyright © 2024 Eli Skipp