Road Kill
Matt Roberts
The leaves were piling up in the window wells and
alongside the driveway and I thought I need to get out of this place, I would do anything to get out of this place. So I loaded up the little black pickup truck with the Rumple Mintz sticker that I bought from my brother with a lantern, a wool blanket and a pair of jumper cables and pushed out past the Virgina Creeper-encrusted carriage house I called home for that anyplace else. On the way out I hit the coons who climbed through the window and ate all the Cat Chow. I hit two skunks along the way, their black-and-white bodies forming an acrid crosshatching against the road’s ordered lines. I hit a porcupine, pulling away with tires unpunctured. Two deer. A bunch of rats. By the time I cleared the county line and broke out of the city limits, a bird. Another bird. Black vee-breasted meadowlarks. Ooonk-a-LUMP. Lump. Lump. A flock of red-winged blackbirds. Black-capped chickadees crumpling and careening off of my front bumper. Brown-headed cowbirds. Burrowing owls. Banking left, banking right deep cobalt-blue-and-rust-colored barn swallows. A couple of bats. A barrage of bugs. Maybe a snake or that may have been an old tie down or maybe a battery cable. No bears, but a big slow-moving beaver. I ate beef jerky bought from a fat man with a Winnebago that told me it was buffalo, but I knew it was dead deer, the smear I left behind ten miles up the road. Or maybe one of the ones I hit somewhere in the days ahead. I drove on. I didn’t drink coffee, but warm beer. Cold fried-chicken from Kroger that came in a clear plastic box. I slept on the edge of the refuge where I hit a couple of cranes, some pheasant, a tiny blue-billed duck that made a sound like a deck of cards being shuffled together. Then I pushed on up the hill. Past the blue spruce, past the bristlecone, up over lava domes, over clouds, past the mirrors that reflect shows like Good Times and Diff’rent Strokes down to the white folk resting in their homes. I hit a hawk, a dove, some great gray owls. Tiny arctic terns, big honking geese. I nosed downward, past masses of Monarch butterflies, skuas, jaegers, the surface of the ocean. I plunged down hitting silver tarpon, humpback whales, big leathery turtles and fire-breathing serpents. Breaking through mounds of coral for the bottom, I crushed countless urchins, crabs and sand-hugging sharks. I pushed on, driving into the ground and into the crust of the earth, the cusp of a continent, running under not over, star-nosed moles, red wriggling worms, shiny black beetles and gray- bearded dwarves. I broke out the other side in China and bought thousand-year-old eggs out of plastic boxes from a skinny man. My tires were burning too hot to allow the xiaoxing wine to stay cool as I like it. The eggs didn’t agree with me. I had left the book I was reading back at home. I left the car. Walked home. I didn’t see much from there.
Matt Roberts has published work in Many Mountains Moving, The Chattahoochee Review, A and has also been named a finalist in nonfiction for the Writers@Work Fellowship. He teaches writing at Colorado State University.