Under the Milky Way (Preview)

A pop song blared through the cooling night, chasing speed with decibels. Headlights, alone in the dark, couldn’t capture the moon’s holiday.

            A flash, the crash, eyes…surprised, obsidian fear in the pale light, the bang, and a gash. Metal molded, broken, dented, a high-speed plastic sculpture, torn and shredded. Panic, elevated rates, raced and raced, pounding out a deafening beat from heart to veins to appendages, encompassing, hitting ears with a constant mosquito buzz.

            I had been driving, the one behind the wheel, the only one, in the car, on the road, everything empty in the hollowed out night. But even in the glistening moonlight, backlit by stars, I didn’t see it. Not in time. It charged its majesty through the dark, taking advantage of the sleeping humans and their steel-reinforced concrete encroaching by deadline, profit, and overtime.

You never know when a conversation will be the last. There’s no indication, no overriding clue, no omniscient mystic letting you know it’s the last. It just happens. You never think it has happened. There is always room for hope something will change—circumstances, attitudes—we always leave room for hope. But it does happen. It happens more than we want to accept. It’s a defeating reality, so we hold out for hope. Yet when it happens, we are blindsided. I was.

            My fingers drummed along with the beat, taking rhythm for granted and allowing melody and lyrics to crash into and through, loud enough to lose awareness of what I was doing, singing along or not. I was connected, for a moment…deeply. A careless moment, not thinking, something blissful amid avalanches of weight…responsibilities, tasks, decisions, schedules, planning, money, belief…continuous circles…past, present, future, all playing out at once, anchoring monuments to flesh…but a breath, a sliver of a breath beat out of my chest without reservation…a heave, a sigh lost to the night.

            But as the moment approached harmony, it vaulted from a vague notion to a reality filled with bone, blood, and density. The split second I saw it, something compelled me to swerve, but the impact was immediate, not head-on but glancing yet still staggering. Thudding…crunching…squealing. My wheels stopped as I pulled onto the grassy median, and the night went silent. My ears clouded, and even though I could see my headlights framing the weeds against a blanket of black, my eyes felt blind. My fingers were part of the steering wheel and I would have to let them be for a moment as I tried to calm the racing piston inside my chest that threatened to break through bone and flesh to voice its objections.

At some point, I must have turned off the radio; I don’t remember doing it, but it was silent. I took a breath, then another, and another, and another until I was able to blink, and many more before I could think. I had hit something, or something hit me, not me, but my car, an extension of me, me in space, a space that had just been violently violated. It was big, it was heavy. Had it just been me, and not the car, I would have stood no chance. It was force and velocity but also hair, breath, and blood. I needed to survey the scene, the damage, but I also had a growing sense of needing to be without manmade constructs. I killed the lights before opening the door and entering the night.

We argued. That was what we did. We were happy but never wanted to admit it. We needed drama, trumping each other by projecting one inadequacy on top of another and another, feeding our spiral. We made up. We always made up, on epic scales, rendering the conflicts trivial. We were passionate; that was our justification for every blow-up. But this argument was different.

I stepped out into the cold night ready to feed my already raging self-pity, but before I could curse nature’s stupidity, I heard its breath. It was still alive. It puffed out in weighted sighs, each one heavier than the last. And everything became dense.

Flight 575. A number I can’t forget. Flight 575…a number that grew into the heart of our last argument. She was leaving. Not for good. She said she needed a trip…to clear her head. We needed space, we needed to breathe, but still I pushed. I was determined to go along, even booked my own ticket on the same flight. Flight 575.

I forgot about my car as the silence between its battling breaths grew longer. I walked over to it in the moonlight, full and bright enough to see. We were past the outskirts and into the country. No street lights, no intersections, no other cars, just a secluded stretch of country highway, the night sky, the grassy median…no more than a heavily weeded ditch…and us. It lay on its side, head and neck stretched long against the gravel of the road’s shoulder, its body lay mangled…broken without chance of recovery. Its last breath was fast approaching. I took a step closer. It was calm and didn’t move as I took another step. I wasn’t a threat. Whatever fight it had left was internalized.

Privatization of Me (Preview)

            I had been a public commodity for too long.  We all are to some degree.  We are social.  We walk, talk, eat, and work in full view of everyone and everything; some people even manage to do more both savory and unsavory.  Most tend to be bound by an unwritten, unsigned social contract, a loosely agreed upon set of guidelines that allow people to coexist in relatively close proximities to other people without too much violence.  We like to think this sets us apart from the animals.  What separates us from the animals is our ability to analyze and pass judgment on everything in existence.  Lions coexist in prides without leaving a trail of mass leonine carnage, but lions never set up self-help groups, there are no lions setting up shop to break down whether or not other lions are lion enough to be considered well-adjusted lions.  There is no lion Prozac.  Why lions?  The teeth.  I didn’t have the teeth of lions; I had the decaying enamel of modern day humans.  I was lost, guidance was needed…a new direction and it came to me over gelato.  Raspberry.  The sweet cool brought my tongue back to life enough to let my brain form one lucid thought.  If I could recuse myself from myself and turn function over to a well-run entity…that was it.  I would, I would sell myself off, piece by piece, to the highest bidder…some organization or business with better decision-making capabilities.

            Orson Thorson knew how to sell off a body.  He had connections everywhere, and his connections had connections, spinning into a vast web of possibilities.  He was the guy my brother knew, and I never knew my brother to know anyone.  He gave me the number, but before I could pick up the phone, Orson had called me. 

            “I hear you have something to sell.”

            “I do.”

            “What do you have?”

           “Everything.”

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Find these complete stories in You Say Know Me and dive into more of Mark Nesheim’s unique storytelling in Hot Minnesota Sex Death, two compelling reads awaiting your attention.