(3) Olivia Braley: Broken Land Parkway
We are driving down Broken Land Parkway in silence because things have gone sour and nothing we say can help this. We’re going 47 miles per hour but there are brake lights ahead so this number is shrinking. I’m nervous so I pick at my cuticles, the dirt under my nails, a scab on my knee. Your right hand is at 2 o’clock on the steering wheel, left arm resting against your window. In driving school my instructor told me to always keep my hands at 4 and 7 so that if the driver’s seat airbag deploys in an accident, it won’t break both your arms. On a different, less sour day, I’d tell you this. Today, I stare hard out the window, as if the blur of trees beyond the shoulder were meaningful.
A little white sign at the edge of the road says that this section of highway is sponsored by IHOP. The last time we were at an IHOP together, it was the morning after a Halloween party a few years back. We decided to go at the last minute. We made makeshift vampire costumes using the fake blood that had been in the top drawer of my bedside table, next to condoms and unfinished crochet projects, since we started dating. You, digging around in the drawer, pants half-off, panting, would always joke about this while looking for a Trojan. Each time I reminded you it would come in handy one day. See? I told you that evening, dabbing that syrupy red substance from the tube on the corners of your mouth, I told you this would come in handy someday. Then you laughed and said, What would I do without you? and I smiled and said, I dunno, probably die and you kissed me and got fake blood on my mouth. We still had the fake blood dried and smeared on our faces as we walked into the IHOP and asked for a table for two, turning heads as we were guided through the restaurant to our seats, past families still dressed up from Sunday morning mass. On another day I would point out the sign and ask you if you remember that night and that morning in IHOP but I don’t, I just look over to you briefly and then away again, turning up the volume on the radio so I can’t talk over it.
I’m playing my Spotify over the Bluetooth and singing along under my breath, acting casual because I am trying to keep myself from all this talking but I can’t help making noise when I’m nervous. The song is “Aphasia” by Pinegrove. When the lyrics go one day I won’t need your love, I stop singing because I can’t say that part. I hit next before the singer can repeat the line. You probably notice this but you don’t react, just keep driving. We are driving down Broken Land Parkway like we have done a million times before: going to your parents’ house, to parties, to the climbing gym, to pick up Thai Paradise. But this time it feels like the GPS is taking us this way just to spite us, to remind us of our own brokenness, of the rift widening between us. This time it feels like the pavement will buckle and the trees lining the parkway will start to fall, one by one and then more rapidly, thudding as they drop like bodies, trembling the ground with each hit until the broken land fractures right in front of us and the whole world crumples and swallows us with it and this image is so sad and dramatic I almost tell you about it but I stop, choke down my sentences.
We are still driving down this suburban road in your mid-priced, messy Jeep, when you break, yell God, this fucking sucks and bang both hands on the top of the steering wheel— still at 10 and 2— which pulls me out of my musing and plants me back in the passenger seat.
I don’t want to be planted here, in this car, in this life I’ve built myself around. It’s rained every day for two weeks, so long that there was nothing to write about except the rain, and this too feels like the universe conspiring just to spite me. All the bugs crawled inside my apartment so that they wouldn’t drown, but the plants couldn’t move so they just drooped and their leaves yellowed. Are you a bug or a plant? I wonder, but don’t ask, plus that question is so stupid and you wouldn’t understand it without the context. I think I’m a plant, I decide, so I just have to hope it stops raining before it kills me. I consider that perhaps this is the wrong approach, but a plant can’t help its nature.
It’s 8:17 PM and the sun is setting and this part of the Parkway must face due West or close to it because the waning light is blinding. I squint out the windshield. This is the sunset we’ve been waiting for for two weeks. This is the first beautiful, midsummer swathe of color we’ve seen in a while, flush with pink and a roaring hellish orange, like if we kept driving we’d hit the end of all this and be incinerated with the day.
Olivia Braley is a mostly-poetry writer living in Annapolis, Maryland. She is a co-founder and Editor in Chief of Stone of Madness Press, and a Reader at Longleaf Review. She is pursuing her Master’s of Liberal Arts at St. John’s College, holds a B.A. in English Literature and Spanish from the University of Maryland, College Park, and is an alumni of the Jiménez-Porter Writers' House. Keep up with her work on Twitter @OliviaBraley