Slip & Slide

Rain taps its nervous fingers on the car roof like I do on my desk before Tuesday spelling quizzes. Usually the moon’s like a lazy sun, laying out the desert in smudgy grayscale, but the clouds turned all the lights out and I can’t tell where the dirt hills touch the sky. Empty road with glowy white sixty miles-per-hour signs, but Delilah on 101.5 fm tells us to go nice and slow on this stormy night before Melanie joining us from Amargosa Valley asks why her boyfriend has seemed so distant lately. So we’re at a drowsy thirty-five miles per hour. 9:27 pm and tomorrow’s a school day, so I smile a little in the backseat blackness, let the rainy nighttime swallow me up…

My ice skates are slipping out from under me on the frozen lake but when my eyes snap open I’m lurched forward in my carseat staring at Velcro shoe straps, we’re stopped on the road’s shoulder and Dad’s turned the radio off. Mom clickclacks the center console and mumbles something about the Clark County Police being slow and then Dad gets out of the car. When I ask why she tells me to go to sleep because tomorrow we have Christmas assembly in the morning and she asks me if my red tights are clean. She falls silent to Motorola flip-phone beeps. I peer out the window tracking the hunkered-over silhouette shuffling toward two amber beams of light and a crumpled mound of shiny metal that doesn’t look like it’s right-side up.