Road Trip

The rain splatters on the windshield like insects and I remember the road trip, last fall, when we counted each tick against the glass. We counted, shaking our heads with dark, guttural laughter, until the body count became too high and the splatter too thick, and our pupils clouded, soon overcast, and our thoughts turned to the dark corners in our minds—between frontal and parietal, temporal and occipital—as we realized the destruction. The road we traveled was a death march, our guns pointed and fired. No tolerance: move or die. I wish I had known then that, down the road, I would stop moving, press on the brakes. You would point, fire, and I would die.