Vacation’s End

Vacation’s End original published by Door is a Jar

Desert all around, dust and hillspire and dots of antelope. A family of four ride the highway West. Old car. Oldish father, mother. Two children in the backseat. The daughter clamors to the window. Nostril imprint, blue-purple lips.

“Can’t we stop?” she nearcries.

The father huffs.

Her brother  repeats the question.

The mother turns. Black hair spattered across her brow, tired ringlets. She doesn’t speak—they cower.

Powerlines ghost by in twos and the siblings can’t help but point. Whisper communications about how they’d climb the distant giants. The mother calls them twins. They’re not. The son is black-haired, twisty-curly, fat-nosed, bone-jawed. The daughter is fair-eyed, fair-skinned. The father has joked, They can’t be mine—are they the milkman’s, the roofer’s?

He’s not joking now. He’s dead on home. Floored, 80-90-95. The car struggles and speaks—fan belt clucking, suspension cussing. Age old rust sparks and dusts the road behind them. 

“Music?” he asks.

They are beautiful, man and wife. But now, their voyage home, they look like drench-soaked sailors, undrunk. Filled gills with sand and salt. Vacationers who are vacationed out. She is tall and scrunched in her seat—long, oaky, sweaty legs cross and uncross. A tick of nervousness, a tick of going too fast. She adjusts her bunched up dress in fidgets—yellow flowers, brown and black.  He is long too; his kids think of him as bendy, angular. Limber-looking willow tree. 

The scenery scrubs by. Spacecraftlike. Windows cracked open, rushed air smell, huzzary buzzary. Mountains in the distance, flattop, once bedrock, shift and adjust the horizon. The children watch the passing sunlight shape the plains. Shadowed creatures manifest and bound through the orange-wavery hills.  

The mother tries the radio. Crackle, crackcrickle. Drums, bassline, highnote, for a moment. Cawcurring, cawcrackle, currcaw. Father shakes his head no. “Worth a shot,” he mouths and puts his full weight into the steering wheel. He’s no longer ending, but bending and formed to the helm. Faded leather clutched, atomic level binding. Man is car is man. 

Silhouetted on the side of the road an arch of rock rises. The children jostle in their seats and dare another, “Please?” 

“No,” father blurts.

“But…”

He turns to face them. Wild white slit wide-eyed eyes, red. Car is man is. Floating now. Steady, steady. Screeching. Steel buckling. Correction. Bucking bronco. Uncorrected. Gored through matador. Concussive, coconuts. Yelping. Screaming. Howling. Full earful, fulnear death. Full tilting. One way, one way. 

Silence. 

Purpling leviathans, born in the updripping dusk, surround them—their shadows stretch and fill the world with tricklight. Moon rising windnoise whistles and groans and grows in echoes as the children dance. Holding hands and cheering in their freedom. The red earth pales yellow.

The car, the wife, the husband, the two children, all frozen in debris and rising dust, all breathing deeply, all checking for pulses and lost body parts. The mother speaks first, but makes no sense, an incomprehensible syllable, syllable, sob. The father peels his hands from the wheel and laughs. The car is dead, mangled, hissing. The children tumble out. Unafraid. In fact, the blood on the son’s forehead makes them giddy. The daughter touches it with the fat of her hand and presses it to her face. Palmprinted beauty.

Gray clouds gather, orange-lined. Lightning in their hollows. Mother and father sit quietly in the wreckage, a moment of reprieve. She reaches across the console and touches his face. Stubbled, new-wrinkled, still young-eyed. She follows his jawline to pink lipline to temples. Curled silver over his sweat-peaked ears. His calloused hand rests above her bare knee and walks, mandolinlike, up her thigh. Smoke smell and binding piston reek can’t stop them. Tooth tongue, lip stumbling, never alone, alone at last. 

The children make it to the near hills—have gathered sticks and rocks, rubies and diamonds; new friends, wolves and birds. Volcanic black rocks, in slips and slabs, crunch under their feet as they climb. They hold their hands in binocular shape and stake claims on all creation. Nightfall covers the earth. Thunder amasses, east and west. Headwinds collide headwinds. Dust devils. Devils. Darkness. Will be mine, they say. And mine and mine.