Swerved to miss a rabbit and missed. Three-point turn, almost not enough shoulder and almost tipping the car. The highway empty except for a deer in the pine stand, except for stars, a tangle of barbed wire in the dry sky. Only me all the way down and only me all the way back, the difference being that on the way down it was Eastern Tiger Swallowtails exploding against the windshield in fat bursts of yellow and on the way up a hail of mosquitos, summer snowstorm of guts. My eyes are sticky with tired and rabbit blood and I remember every single night I drove from one tiny room to another tiny room and tried to use my weight to serve me. The car window was always down and something got caught in the slipstream, landed legs on the nape of my neck. Reoriented, predatorial, in the dark I reached my hand behind my head and plucked the thing from the fur of my hair and threw it toward the ground with a force that surprised me. Surprised me so much that I forgot all about it until I came back to the car, after hitting the bag again and again, knuckles red, sweating tears through my shirt, saw the shell of a fat cicada on the floorboard and said “how the hell did you get here,” and that was too much to swallow so I threw up on the concrete in a fine June rain. Lay my head on the leather seat and held the dead body in my hand, black and slick, a mirror. I held it like when I was on a walk and found the husk of a female hercules beetle climbing a wood post, ran my thumb along its ridged pincers, wrapped it around my finger like an ornamental ring, promised I would remember the number of spots on its back but I forgot. The tarsi sharp enough to cut like the glass that slipped in my hand and sliced through my pinky, requiring stitches and leaving a numbness that persists in the joint so that when you hold my finger between your teeth I do not feel a thing.
Alice Wu