It Looks Like It Might Eat You.
by Ryan Kennebeck


With 44 entries, Ryan Kennebeck has won $66 from our flash fiction contest and a place in our second anthology.


    The interstate is a parking lot—cars stopped for as far as you can see, curling back like a parade of headlights, white and sharp. It’s the middle of nowhere, Arizona, midnight—so desolate a place it could be mistaken for the moon. Except the moon could never feel this heavy. And only rarely this hot.
    I’m in the middle lane, boxed in by four semis, two trucks and an ancient Oldsmobile. The sound of the Oldsmobile idling is loud. It’s similar to the sound of someone being choked in a Hitchcock movie.
    I get out of my dirty car, yawn, my arms just rubber bands with paper fists stapled to the ends. Driving this long always makes me feel like origami. Not even the good kind—just the sort third-graders make—lumpy swans that look diseased and hollow. Nothing like how they’re supposed to look.
    I’m twenty-five and a half today. Traffic jams and half birthdays have always made me feel old.


*


    Traffic has been stopped for an hour, people have just started to get out of their cars. Boom. A sudden population of strangers caught in the middle of nowhere between points A and B. People are congenial enough—having a common setback makes empathy easy. Everyone shares thoughts, guesses, look off into the distance, squint, try to collectively ascertain the cause of the jam. Impossible. Too far away. Just rose-colored brake lights as far as you can see. It’s weird—the lights set my mouth watering over the memory of red crayons.
    My ass is asleep. It sparkles.
    It’s less stuffy out on the road and the sky is bleeding stars and beautiful. In the open air, the collected low hum of idling car engines sound like dry throat music. It’s what this place should sound like—I’ve never had this feeling about a place before, but I’m sure of it. It’s the sort of sound that could disappear into the scenery—under the rocks, into the shadows.
    It’s hot—but not like beach sand hot. This heat is mostly friction—from tires and car engines and busyness. Heat that sounds like idling car engines. This heat is partly mine.
    I stand on the sides of my feet where the skin is less sensitive and walk around. Like a penguin. I try to stay out of the way of moms streaming sometimes frantically around the cars. They’re looking for an RV, a bus, anything with a bathroom. Kids can’t hold it for more than an hour. It’s not a part of their culture. One boy holds his mom’s hand with one arm, pinches his crotch with the other—like holding the Nile back through pinching together its shores. The mom drags him like she’s embarrassed. A little girl squats experimentally behind some brush by the side of the road, maybe too nervous to do anything. Her dad stands a few feet away with his back turned. His crossed arms, big shoulders look like all the privacy in the world.
    One boy—standing in front of my car—is looking up at the stars. I don’t know what car he came from. He’s in corduroy shorts and a black, faded Hard Rock Café shirt. No shoes, he switches from bare foot to bare foot every couple of seconds. His balance is enormous—he doesn’t sway or kick off balance. He just stands there, on one foot, his head cocked back and his eyes on the stars, his hands folded behind his back.
    I haven’t seen him blink yet. I follow his gaze up and the night sky is so pecked with light I have to sit down on the trunk of my car before I fall down. It’s so there and big, it looks like it might eat us.
    For a while, the two of us just stare at the stars.


*


    The semi to the right of me suddenly has a collection of young men hanging around its driver’s side door. I count six. Three have their shirts off. One has no front teeth. The driver hangs out of his door, laughs with them. They’re all focused on a small television monitor in the cab. It’s pointed out the driver’s side window. It’s playing a porno. Something eighties. Big hair, big earrings, big bracelets. Eye shadow, orange lipstick. A guy and a girl going at it on a lounge chair by a pool. He’s got a flat-top. Pecks like cupcakes. She’s on her knees and her elbows with her ass stuck up in the air. He’s slapping her ass cheeks, moving in and out of her kind of rough. His voice—tinny and far away from the television’s small speakers—is saying Bitch, cunt, bitch, whore.
    One of the shirtless men says Turn that shit up. So the driver turns it up. The voice gets a little louder, a little more like tin. The flat-top says That’s right. You bitch. That’s how you like to be fucked. The girl makes a moaning noise as if to suggest that this is how she likes to be fucked, and how clever of the flat-top to think of it.
    The little boy on one foot turns his head. He looks into the cab, at the television. His eyebrows bunch up, like this is something new to him, new to the world. He still doesn’t blink. He just looks over for a long time, the waves of heat passing over all of us in currents, like we’re at the bottom of an ocean.
    With a flinch, the driver of the semi suddenly realizes the boy’s attention and discreetly snaps the television off. The young men groan, but the driver nods in the direction of the boy and they don’t argue.
    The boy switches feet. He stops looking at the television. He stops looking at anything at all. He looks at the pavement.
    In the shadows—the drone of cars idling, the sudden splash of little kids pissing



About the author:
Ryan Kennebeck was born in California in 1982 and lives in Ohio. Currently, he is completing a collection of short stories. His favorite song is "Beast of Burden" by the Rolling Stones.


© 2009 Ryan Kennebeck