Milo imagines every roaring ambulance and flashing siren is for her. The thought slips in and out like a smooth green snake in summer grass, the movement so slight she wonders if she saw anything at all. She wonders, briefly, if somehow she’s just been in a terrible accident and hasn’t realized yet, but as quickly as the thought appears, it turns back to Tammi and Marvin and the harmonies in “If I Could Build My Whole World Around You.” Milo’s at a red light, driving home on a remarkably clear spring evening, rust creeping up lace-like on the Tahoe in front of her. The nub of a snapped rear window wiper wiggles back and forth like a dog’s lazy tail and she wonders if the driver knows the back wiper is turned on. It’s golden hour, not a rain drop in sight. She remembers passing the time on late-90s road trips finding faces in cars’ backsides—wideset tail-light eyes, slender trunk-seam smiles and license-plate noses. When the light flicks green, the Tahoe scampers ahead with a stick in its jaws and Milo turns up the radio dial. She races down the beltline with the other greyhounds. All the cars are silver and white and black these days, all in a hurry to catch their imaginary rabbits. It’s not quite warm enough, but she cracks the windows anyway, letting the music of her youth—really the music of her father’s youth—pour out like smoke, pressing the pedal down all the way, the car running faster and faster and Milo grinning wider and wider and the face in the rear grinning alongside her as she soars past the long line of hounds in the next lane, through red light after red light, maybe toward home, maybe toward somewhere else entirely.
Sarah Lynn Hurd is a writer and poet from Michigan. Her work appears in
Fictive Dream, HAD, Flash Frog, and elsewhere. She has a BA in creative writing and English literature from GVSU, and she'll be attending UW-Madison for her MFA in fiction starting this fall. More at: sarlynh.com
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