Ripped sideways into a skid-stop, gravel spray, like a triumphant hockey player splashing to a point.  Bug-splattered grille a foot from the edge.  My relief was instant, but your mind couldn’t fight the momentum.  To you, we flipped over the steering wheel and through the windshield and down the side of the mountain, caught on a tree or two in the long terror of falling.  I took your place in the driver’s seat and drove as you watched our other future splash into a stream near the valley floor and settle into the current.  Seatbelts dangled in the car’s lonely exoskeleton, water already half-way up the windows.
     Our stories diverged with details: a second, a pebble, an inch, a single rev of the engine.  Let me explain that I gathered these up and locked them in the trunk.  Let me explain that I refuse to live other futures, that this pond at the top of the mountain was a deep dark bright green, like an eye staring into the sun, that the fir trees waiting at its edges stretched like eyelashes into the sky.       Skinny-dipping on the top of that mountain was clairvoyance, then; we made a sloping mud acropolis and let ourselves get caught in our only future and the stare of a cold mountain iris.

Published On: July 21, 2007
Permanent Location: http://www.forgetmagazine.com/070721a.htm