BY A. K. COTHAM
Previously published as the third-place winner of Brilliant Flash Fiction’s 2022 Flash Fiction contest. Copyright is held by the author.
NOBODY LIKES Interstate 5. Like most, I tolerated it. But your greatest joy was putting pedal to the metal on the flattest stretch with no red lights ahead, no white lights behind. Halfway between Sacramento and the Grapevine, at night, I-5 laid out before us like a wasteland divided, the full moon high and heavy like a cliché, you rolled down the windows and turned off the headlights.
“Fucking lunatic!” I shouted through the wind. “Turn them back on!”
“We can see just fine!” You laughed through my shouting, then relented.
It had only been a minute, probably less.
But it became tradition, on each trip — “Keeps you on your toes!” you’d chortle. “You have to trust the road you’re on.”
“Nobody trusts this road, what does that even mean, and I don’t want to be on my toes.” But your joy was infectious and I’d hide a smile through each argument.
A year into your diagnosis, I drove the whole way. You slept in the passenger seat, your breathing shallow. Cars wove in, out, passing us by, moving onward. Dusk passed slowly through that kaleidoscopic haze when everything became slightly more than three-dimensional. It was almost a relief when darkness sharpened and settled during that last stretch, interrupted by nothing but taillights and mileage signs.
The music was low. The moon was full.
All that could be said had been said. No more bullshit. No more memories.
Then you whispered, “Roll down my window?”
I did, and you crept your fingers out to high-five the wind. They vibrated, thin and brittle as hair, as if they might snap off and fly away.
You whispered something else — but facing away, your words carried off into the wind. I thought I understood you anyway. Words were becoming part of the past now, and I was holding onto every last one:
Time to trust the road.
Taking a breath, I turned off the headlights.
The individual beams directly in front of our car disappeared — just a moment of transition, a tremor, a terror — then I fell back into the landscape. The same vastness as before but different: the moon glowing over us, lighting up new shadows in the spare land, the intermittent caverns of hay and barns and housing, and your profile, breathing it all in and out. The wind filling up the space between us.
***
A. K. Cotham lives in Northern California. Her fiction has appeared in places such as CommuterLit, MicroLit Almanac (the original publisher of “Autumn Canopy”), 50-Word Stories, Microfiction Mondays, Every Day Fiction, and Black Fox Literary Magazine. Two short stories have been performed by Sacramento Stories on Stage, and a piece won third place in, and earned a Pushcart Prize nomination for, Brilliant Flash Fiction’s 2022 writing contest. Her work is at akcotham.wordpress.com/.
