BANG OUT

In the choking stillness, you come to, covered in road dust, hands on the wheel, a spray of your blood on the windshield, the car stalled in a ditch, as you wonder why, why, why, you have not died on this perfect heat-crushed expanse, the merciless sky grinding down on bone-white gravel roads, over endless dry fields, not a tree line in site, only oil derricks, like prehistoric birds’ heads, dipping and raising with a hiss, this scattered apocalyptic flock you are ready to sacrifice yourself to, drive straight into, melt bone and blood and muscle in an explosion of fire and steel, but as you kick away the rattling empties from beneath the accelerator petal, start the car to lurch forward, you see it for the first time–a withered, leafless sapling barely spared, bent by the force of the front bumper, but rising over the hood like a hand saying stop, at the same time a hand reaching up into that blank white sky, a gesture of sudden, desperate beauty that tears a hole in your numbness, and for the first time in months you laugh, hear yourself laugh out loud—by what luck has it survived! and who are you to end its stupid, fragile struggle—and you can’t jam the transmission in reverse fast enough, to get off of it, to get back on the road, to get the hell out of there and get on with your fucking life.

Copyright © 2009, Paul Dertien.