CW: discussion of death

I.

Observe closely the road beneath your feet. Thirty stories down, maybe more, depending on the day. Look at the cars zipping along like salmon upstream. If you’re clever, you’ll notice that they are too bright to be real cars. They are aqua, goldenrod, pink—a river to nowhere, a shriveling sunflower, a tongue hanging loose from the mouth of a dead dog. They are too bright to be real cars.

II.

But I always did know you were clever. So observe closely the road beneath your feet. Now it’s ten stories; you have no excuse for inaccuracy. Look at the cars. Pick one. Follow it with your eyes. Aqua, good choice. You must like Chanel. If you had picked goldenrod I would have known you liked Hermès. If you had picked pink I would have known I’d have to kill you.

III.

You’re following the aqua car. It whips around the corner of 1st and Main and shoots out of your vision. But you still know where it’s going. It’s going past the warehouse where Employee #2461 has been shortchanged on her paycheck again. Rent will be difficult this month. Who is she? It does not matter. What matters is that she is planning to kill her manager later. She has a hatchet in her car, but you won’t tell anyone. The aqua car flies down Main in this baking afternoon where the sky is the color of the taste of sand. It must halt at an intersection. The stoplight emerges from the haze, blinking red like Something at a crossroad. 

IV.

Now you go past a flower stand and you’re almost home. The seat leather is cracked, the cracks are filled with dirt, and the dirt will never be scrubbed out. They meander throughout the leather like rivers in the desert. Like those rivers that are so impossibly bright blue they must be a child’s ribbon dropped from the heavens. Like the impossible blue of the car. It sounds like velcro when you try to unstick your thighs from the seat. The air is heavy and dense and tea-colored, but it has none of the comfort of a good kettle. The flower man is selling tulips today. They’re pink, just like the car that would have caused you to die. 

V.

Now we are home, but it is not your home so don’t get any ideas. Up here—fifty stories because it is a Friday—the air is cooler and a little bluer. Just enough for you to hope that there are blue skies elsewhere. Not that you will ever know. No one’s boss will die today because I have stolen the hatchet. It is waiting inside for you.