Stripped Car

There’s something in me that likes to imagine the things I’m afraid of, for example, the future. I don’t mean the celestial fireworks from melting reactors, or New York under six feet of sea water, but the future in its most intimate, most probable forms—vignettes subversive enough to slip through the radar. That’s how I come to be crouched behind a stripped car wondering would it be too dangerous to piss in the street? It would, I’m a woman. So I go on holding it, distracting myself by trying to remember every fruit I’ve ever eaten, their exact textures and flavors. So far the most exotic is the custard apple. I use up a whole hour of daylight and then another—apricot, blueberry, plum— calves cramping from having to stay low, waiting behind a car pitted with the acne of automatic fire. There are still too many guns walking around out there, and no one I know, so I’m waiting for twilight at least. Is everyone alone now? The wind says so. It says a winter is coming without oil. It bites to get my attention and scatters a few leaflets, pictures of a blackened car, a city that seems to catch on fire every sunset, though there’s little enough to burn. Stone only chars. This isn’t a likeness of the future, is it? Every person in the street a stranger? Will a word like ‘neighbor’ survive this? I fired a gun once. It smelled rancid, sour, like bad food. It hurt my shoulder and left a wound of oil on my shirt. My mind is thinking of sleep again. Sleep lets things escape—my pocket-knife vanished through a knife-sized hole. There’s nothing to cut, no guava, nectarine, winter pear, and nothing left of the car at all, not even the rear-view mirror I was counting on, hoping my face could tell me it was safe to go home, and where is that? A place with a bed and a desk where I sit and plot next year’s garden on graph paper. The skin of a tangelo is faintly pebbly, easy to peel, but the sweetest citrus is the satsuma, then the clementine. If I had to choose between natural disaster and a firing squad, I’d take the river of lava any day. Hurricane, tidal wave, tornado, drought. I want the earth, which is waiting under the sidewalk, to be the one. Not any of these human shadows sporting their silhouetted guns. There were gun shadows before, but the two worlds overlapped, guns and the amber waves of grain. It’s hard to say whether bramble fruits actually have skins. Does a raspberry? Does each tiny globe have its own? How will I live without the earth? In a stripped car, unable to piss when I want to, all the time cold? Maybe weapons interbred with humans, and a strain of hybrids was born, half metal, half flesh. I know there’s an enemy— look at all the damage it’s doing. Maybe it’s still a baby, its weak neck wobbling as its carriage lurches over the broken pavement. But probably by now it’s a sulking adolescent starting to look like serious trouble, with a silky little shadow-moustache and a gun. Who’ll kill it? Will I? What if it doesn’t look like the enemy? What if it comes disguised as a savior, or resembles nothing so much as hunger, so that everyone has his own private piece to kill? Will we do it?