The Surreality of the World Rushing by in Reverse

          When I was a kid in the very back of a red station wagon, unbuckled, facing backwards, a blue car with two cows in the backseat drew alongside of me.

          It hadn’t grown light yet; we were driving to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. We’d left early to avoid the tollbooth lines, but here we were, stuck in one, or maybe the bridge had opened to let a ship through. It was just my mom and I, but I liked it in the way-back.

          I waved at the two cows. I couldn’t make out the driver. The cows had their heads out the window, tongues out.

          Mooving Day. Udderly Ridiculous. I often thought of titles or captions for fleeting things.

          The two of them, smooshed together in that window, as if wombed twins, reminded me of my only-childness, of a brother or sister who never was because my mother and father fell out of love. Had I learned to love loneliness because that’s what I’d been given? Or would I have always been drawn to the way-back?

          As it often happened, the traffic inexplicably began to move again. And when the cows passed us, I said to my mother, “Look! Look!”

          “What?” she asked. “I don’t see anything.”

          She always missed things. Later, as we crossed the bridge, I said, “I am all alone.”

          And she didn’t say the expected, “But you have me.” Instead, she said, “Yes. I think I’ve tricked myself into thinking you prefer it like that.”
 
          There was mostly pity in adults’ eyes for me, for how large I was, the blankness I presented to them. They saw me as some kind of lack made flesh, only too much of it. It was with themselves that their eyes filled. But not my mother’s. I saw only myself reflected in them, filling them, the way those cows filled the window.
 
          “I do, Mom.” Whole worlds spun from my head, fully born. “I mean prefer it like that.”

          I asked my mom to speed up, and she did. I wanted to see the cows again, wanted to see their faces pressed together, their bright eyes, how they had no thoughts about me or why a kid would want to sit alone in the back of a car racing to the edge of the world backwards.

          I climbed to the front seat and pointed them out to my mother. I told her my captions and she laughed. She added Milk Shake and Cattle Drive.  

          I turned to climb back to my place, when my mom stopped me. “Stay. Just for a bit.”

          I did. I waited for the ocean.  At some point, she took my hand in hers, drove with one hand. I stuck my head out the window.

          “Mooo!”

          My mom did the same.

          I didn’t think about it, really think about it, until forty years later, today, at the edge of that rectangular hole, once again that kid, unbuckled in the way-back, alone.

Plumbing

          She wants to see the bucket of sludge from the upstairs sink. Dazzling, she says. She offers him coffee from a machine, explains each sound: the grinding of the beans, the tamping of the grounds, the pre-brewing, brewing, bubbling of steam to make foam. He still holds the wire snake, unsure of its place, of lines to be crossed. She says there's a lilt about him, and the only thing that comes to mind is a song from a black and white movie, Good Time Coming. She says her husband hates the machine, its noise and bulkiness; she has the coffee waiting for him after he showers. The plumber takes his own taste, understands now the origin of the black sludge in the bathroom sink. He wonders if it is love that makes him pour each cup into the drain. Or something altogether else.

Randall Brown teaches at and directs Rosemont College's MFA in Creative Writing Program. He has been published widely, both online and in print, and blogs regularly at FlashFiction.Net. His is also the founder and managing editor of Matter Press and its Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.