Dès Vu
One of them is at the wheel, the other in the back. She rides shotgun. The three of them sing with Tracy Chapman, and she knows this is the why of her, to be with them this way. So she rides and sings and watches the moment angle itself securely into the messy rooms of her mind.
Stores and strip malls rush by as they drive through their small New England town. She hears them singing, Driving, driving in my car, speed so fast, their shoulders dancing, their voices breathing marks on the windshield like fingerprints. Their babyhoods wash through her, and she sees new swells of womanhood in glossy hair and glittered nails. She wonders at the obfuscations of time and the arthritic curve of her own unpolished fingers. The scene is being lived and fixed within her all at once as she watches the three of them singing full throttle, rocking the Jeep Cherokee—feeling like I belonged, feeling like I could be someone, be someone. . .
And she feels the reverberations of who she had been at thirty driving solo through her Connecticut countryside, driving, driving, singing with Tracy Chapman, and who she is now, speed so fast collapsing into their twenty-something right-now feelings that they could be someone, be someone. And kinship wedges itself deep between her ribs.
Her two granddaughters have no idea.
JUDITH LYSAKER lives in Indiana with her brilliant, veggie-loving German Shepherd. An erstwhile academic, she now spends long hours writing short forms. Her work has appeared in Gone Lawn, *82, FlashFlood, and Does It Have Pockets.