Drive
Heather Heckman-McKenna
The façade, it cracks, like old oil on canvas. My face stained warm and red. The ceremony, ancient weeks ago, long past in my tinny memory. Liquid iron taste in my mouth from yesterday’s backhand. Thick hurting sludge in my throat from where you choked me.
How could I know? Two days after our wedding. My family, all there. Ecstatic for me. I was, too. Two days later those broad hands rose against me for the first time. Worse, those leering eyes. Happy faces lined up before me, Mom and Dad standing sentinel, and even tiny Mom looked tall. Everyone so proud to see their little girl starting her new life.
Two days later, you beat the living shit out of me. Mom and Dad had their house on the line with our business and tens of thousands of dollars besides. What was I supposed to do?
Memories of fists and loud words and so many broken things around me: a mug here, a chair there, a swollen eye, broken shards of an heirloom wooden bed frame, contused cheekbones and a concussed head, a plate smashed to dust against my face then a wall, broken ragged skin, blue beads from my necklace skittering across the floor as you tore against my throat, even a shattered television screen. Invisible arms wrapping around my lungs and pushing the oxygen right back out into the atmosphere.
The trees outside quiver and quay, and I am left alone on this red comfy couch, watching the distant world—green and moving—through my windows. The rain comes harder now, persistent. I smell damp soil, a promise of things unseen yet to grow. It seems the rain will never end, and I think I’m okay with that. Then the sharp metallic smell of ozone permeates the room, and I imagine it worming its way into the fibers of the tan carpet before me, so even when the rain itself stops, the ozone remnants remain, continuing to pollute the air in my sanctuary. I enjoy the rhythm of the slanting drops hitting the windows to my right, the ones overlooking the driveway and our weeds in all their greatness. I’ve never understood distaste for weeds. They are strong, determined to subsist despite suburbia’s best efforts. Many could take a lesson in beauty and resilience from those tall ragged dandelions and thistles and wispy purple foxtails.
I remember the decades-old Calvin and Hobbes mug—the one that even survived the house fire that took nearly everything else. You flung it off the porch and into the weeds, and I remember the irate look on your face as I calmly rose from my rocking chair, walked to the mug, dropped to my knees, and pulled it out of the weeds. I laughed as I held it up and theatrically showed you the cup of dirt you’d created, as if I were a magician parading my next great feat. A worm wriggled around in it and everything. I wanted to bring it up to you, laugh as I shoved the mug between your lips and made you drink down the coffeemud, maybe force you to choke on the worm. I wanted to laugh as the worm tickled your gums and wriggled in your teeth. I wanted to laugh as you cried as you’ve made me cry when I’ve felt so helpless and vulnerable and profoundly unsafe. I wanted to laugh.
I wanted to laugh.
Instead I dumped the dirt back in the weeds, scooping it out of the mug with my fingers, watching the mud fall and scatter about the ground, and I walked calmly back up to the house in the early morning sun, flitted right by your furious glare, opened the door and went straight to the sink and cleaned it right then and there instead of leaving it behind like I normally would.
Minutes later, I still scrubbed. You walked in behind me and touched my neck, apologized. I turned to look at you, and you kissed my lips. I did not reciprocate. You didn’t notice.
Still, I cleaned the mug.
I drive every night now. Passing headlights illuminate cracked concrete before me. Passing headlights illuminate tiny circles of the woods around me. Evening stars rotate in a black sea above me. I lose myself in the highway tedium of passing line, line, line, line, line, and I count for a while, first in singles, then in twos, then in fives, and I am up to 522 dotted lines when I grow bored. Leaving everything I pass behind as I drive forward, faster, faster, faster than I should. Before and behind equally inconsequential.
Numbness consumes like a converging forest fire, a cackling asphyxiation, yet my vocal cords tremble as screams erupt like molten chocolate down a fondue tower, bubbling out and over the focal numb like some insipid creature that is not me. My eyes remain fixed on the road before me, focused as only someone so lost can focus, focused as only hockey goalies can focus, focused as only one who has learned to read emotion to survive can focus, yet panic now rises thick in my belly, a copious substance I cannot deny or control, and its path toward my chest seems futile to battle any longer.
My Ford Escort seems to move itself to the breakdown lane. My foot presses the brake much too forcefully. The car screams to its own little dance as it shudders to a stop.
Alone. I breathe.
Bile retreats. Puss-like panic thins as a fourteenth car passes. This one slows, as if considering stopping. Thickening stomach pulsating as I imagine a forced interaction with a do-gooder.
Someday I will acclimate to this fast-rising panic, like an over-yeasted dough swelling up through my insides. Some day.
My blood pumps fast. My ears throb, but my hands are steady. I put the car back in gear. And I drive.
Heather Heckman-McKenna is a Ph.D. Student, Research Assistant, and Graduate Instructor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, focusing on creative nonfiction and scholarship on women writers of the 18th- and 19th-centuries. “Drive” is an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir “Finding Orange.” Heather has previously been published in Bacopa Literary Review, Inwood Indiana, The Explicator, and The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review.