by Oleg Daugovish
“Shortcut!” Sofie yells from the backseat as I maneuver out of impatient traffic onto a side road. Our white minivan flies between the sharp-edged grey boxes of industrial buildings and the smooth emerald curves of an empty golf course. I see the red light in the distance.
“Maybe by the time we get there it will turn green.” I glue my foot to the accelerator with hope.
It does not. Sofie, the minivan and I screech to a stop by the intersection.
Seventeen minutes until her school starts, thirty-two until my work.
“It will be green in forty-five seconds.” Sofie starts the bet.
“Sixty!” I wager a chewing gum, pinching a package of Hubba Bubba between fingers for a display.
“One, two, three..” Sofie counts. This girl is serious about winning and so is her voice. Two minutes pass, the light is still red.
What the hell is wrong with it? Should I just ignore it and go?
“I think it’s broken.” Sofie reads my thoughts.
The place is eerily empty, no cars or people around. Automated sprinklers spit in circles on the grass. A rabbit jumps on the road and sits in front of the van, sniffing dust, his perked-up locators turn towards us.
He knows.
“Look, all the humans have been abducted by aliens, there is nobody left. This bunny is their leader!”
Sofie rolls her eyes, unimpressed with my plot.
She grew up so fast.
“Did you know that people spend a quarter of their life like this, sitting in traffic?” I exaggerate, hoping to salvage a “teaching moment” from this glitch in time.
“Bunny!” she screams through an open window.
The furry ball glances at her and hops away.
“In some cultures, people enjoy their time wherever they are.” I pretend to lose interest in the light, ignoring it like a teapot that fails to boil.
“Maybe this light is always red, some things in life are that way.” A wise observation from the eight-year-old catches me by surprise.
“Yes, I grew up in a place and time where pretty much everything was red. Someday, I’ll tell you. But now we have each other and we don’t have to worry about time.”
I look in the rearview mirror and see Sofie’s brown eyes opening wide, mouth too.
“It switched! It turned purple! What does that mean?!”
“Let’s find out!” I floor the gas pedal and the white minivan screams through the intersection.
After completion of Ph.D. in 2001, Oleg Daugovish has been researching the delicate lives of California strawberries. He rushes to tell growers about his discoveries and documents them in peer-reviewed journals. Aside from writing about plants, Oleg completed a humorous 61,000-word memoir about growing up in Latvia during Soviet times and sixteen ten-minute stories of creative non-fiction he’d love to share.
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