The road ahead does indeed look like more than a bowl of morning cereal or something dead and furry you saw the other day on the shoulder or a red kite jerking against a cool blue sky.
It isn’t the curves, the crazy angles of the cable wires, those few drops that run up the wind shield to disappear into the sky. It isn’t yesterday’s argument that ended in the dark or crawled under the purring refrigerator to sleep, the dull thrum of tire rubber, the little click clicks of pebbles leaping at the undercarriage, the anonymous eyes that see you.
You’d heard someone ask for ice cream; you’d heard someone ask about what moves through the forest at night, what doesn’t. And how do oranges taste under water? You close your eyes; you try to imagine how the road might look outside your eyelids; you try to convince yourself that you know how to drive a straight line; you try to imagine what it must feel like to fly into the cool weather clouds you remember, the ones with their shredding edges that drifted over the mountains like whales.
You imagine the boy behind you, sleeping maybe, thirsty, dreaming of those worlds he draws onto paper. You don’t know what will appear when you open your eyes; you don;t know how the world will change. So you keep them shut, locked tight. And hope you remember the way back.
This is what you wish for: that years later you might tell him. “That day we turned back. Do you remember it? I drove you home in the dark.” You might ask: “What did you see when you opened your eyes?”
