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Show Motherlunge a novel 87 steps as I pulled in. I wanted to see his face as he calculated, with one look at Dorothy, how far I had come. Of course I did all the driving, and we took five days to get to Supernal. And nothing happened along the way except one thing, in Nebraska. And it was no big deal and it couldn't be helped, but I still think about it. And when I do, that one thing-one small event buried in the middle of the trip with all its long days, dull croplands, bad radio, poor lumbar support-it comes back weirdly articulate, consistently, like the 60 Minutes stopwatch detailing time. What happened was that an animal-medium-sized, dog-shaped-appeared at the side of the road and then plunged forward. It had an oversimplifying urgency attached to its movement, the way a road flare loses its pink head in a stiff wind. I saw it and I could have swerved or braked, maybe, before it slid beneath my mother's car and became, at that moment for me, a bodily sensation, a consequence occurring in the abdomen distinctly-a pill being swallowed in one gulp, the bass drum's quick contribution to the punch-line (ba-DUM-bump), a kind of quickening. It was like a sick joke, too easy, irresistible. And when I looked in the rearview mirror I saw it behind us in uneven silhouette, ridged and purpled like a set of knuckles stuck to the road, Black Power. And I looked over at my mother next to me; she was turned toward the passenger side window. Didn't she feel it? What was she staring at out the window? You could jab your fingers into those two eyes and she wouldn't see any less. The adrenaline began to come like anger in the cartoons, a climbing redness filling in from the bottom all the way up to my clear and bulbous head, the sweat jumping out of my hands like straightpins onto the steering wheel, and my mind grabbing for something... |