SnohoStories

The possum skittled away from the fog lamp horizon and into the path of the truck in the other lane. Trent crumpled his brow in a grimace, grateful for the pulsing bass and mindless lyrics inside his leather cocoon. He did not look in the rear view mirror, hyper-focused on his internal dialogue. Four hours until the presentation.

He had an idea on Monday, the key to his future at the firm. Trent pulled strings and reserved presentation time at the annual meeting. For two days, he stayed locked in his office, sign on door, tie on hook, shoes kicked off and away. Each night, he returned home in silence, drenched in sweat and smeared in dry erase dust. He drank three meals a day.

The big idea had crept and slithered and grown to saturate his cells, until he became the idea, and the idea was Trent. And now, the morning of the presentation, he had no idea and he was nothing. He tried now to remember, to feel, to breathe Monday. But there were no links. It was a day spent inside his mind, with no external touchstone to reality.

Somewhere between the fogs, he missed his exit and left the highway onto an unfamiliar street. The pavement conveyed the car on and into clarity, where tar met gravel trailing into water and sunrise. They stopped at the edge, both car and mind, and he stepped outside, clutching Monday’s newspaper.

Trent removed his shoes and mismatched socks, but resisted the urge to dip toes in icy murk. He sat in the gravel and unfolded the paper, staring at a day that never happened. Revelation broke above the line of trees, turning the paper and world to white and he began to fold, edges to edges, corners to corners.

He rose with the paper boat and stepped up to swampy reeds, raising his creation high above the trees. Deliberate shade exercised pupils into tools for letters and words, folded context and misread meaning. Trent flexed his fingers, dropping paper and spinning back to the car before the boat launched into the wet.

His socks and shoes now passengers, he rubbed the ball of his foot up and down the accelerator, appreciating the grooves, once deep, now worn with miles of friction and pressure. The highway found his car again, a nameless looping pain thumping his skull and vibrating his seat.

Toes gripped the knobby brake pedal as the road brought him to a pair of crows pulling sinews free from steaming flesh. Siphoned into air, gaming life itself, they vanished. A new blindness stole their shadows as he tried to capture them again in the rear view mirror. Eyes returned to the road, and he wondered if they had been crows or ravens.