Drift Away

by Jenny Morelli

Another late work night has me driving home way past my bedtime and I’m finding it hard to keep my eyes open.

I keep drifting off and wondering whodunit in the book I’m reading, which is right now splayed out on the passenger seat. I’m lost in thought as the miles tick by when my nightmare introduces itself, pounding my car with a wind-whipping storm. I struggle to find the lane lines to avoid drifting into other cars. To calm myself, I reach for a wedge of my snack-portioned apple from my vintage Snoopy backpack and crunch-crunch-crunch to the beat of the hard-working windshield wipers as my car slips and sloshes slowly up the bridge.

I’m soon funneled into a merging lane as blinding-bright flashing lights redirect traffic away from the crumbling cement wall separating the southbound lanes from northbound. Startled, I overcorrect my steering when a wiper-wand breaks free from my windshield, flying off into the night. Fat raindrops continue with a vengeance sluicing down the glass in hypnotic patterns that draw my attention away from the road.

My biggest fears collide like the bolts of lightning stabbing the ground as I hydroplane into a painfully powerless drift, drift, drift from one lane to the next until there are no more lanes and I’m screeching into the metallic barrier. Careening over the edge of time and space and I’m falling. Freewheeling. Flying.

Before I can register all that’s transpiring, I’m smashing into my steering wheel as my car splashes into the indifferent waters, a white spiderweb appearing and growing and spreading across my windshield. Blood trickles from my forehead into my eyes as a red void presses in around me, sucks me down, swallows me into its abyss, into a great unknown, into a great beyond, and I float, suspended, with Snoopy at my side.

I float and flounder inside my car, pingponging from front to rear, from side to side, as reality pressures in around me, and without a whimper, without a scream, with just the slightest of apple-scented inhales. I close my eyes and embrace the implosion. Let the briny blanket of the sea cocoon me as the book I’d been reading slams into my face. Splays open to the last page, the one that reveals who, in fact, has dunit as I drift away into the deepest annals of time, of space, of oblivion.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Jenny Morelli is a NJ high school English teacher who lives with her husband, cat, and myriad yard pets. She seeks inspiration in everything and loves to spin fantastically weird tales. She’s published in several print and online literary magazines including Spillwords, Red Rose Thorns, Scars tv, Bottlecap Press and Bookleaf Press for four poetry chapbooks. Website: JennyMorelliWrites.com

 

The Murder

by Jenny Morelli

There’s a hawk in the overfull parking lot when I pull in, and it’s glaring, at me, as if daring me to approach one of the few available spots.

I try to give it a wide berth as I roll toward it; try to give it a chance to flee, but it stands its ground.

So I let him win and reverse quietly away, drive farther into the lot and right into a murder of crows, sprawled into a lake-sized splotch on the asphalt at the dead-end of the strip mall. I stop and park, straddling a speed bump and just not caring because there’s no way I’m driving anywhere near that.

And then I wait, shifting my gaze from them to the sky, almost expecting it to collapse around me.

Soon, a car pulls up next to me, the wrong way on this small strip of driveable space. He rolls down his window and says something I don’t quite hear because I’m distracted by what’s dangling by strings taped to the ceiling of his rundown sedan.

Bug spray bottles. Too many to count.

They’re still swaying from his hard stop, some banging into his sweat-soaked mop of hair.

He’s utterly unfazed by this as he yells to me. ‘Excuse me.’

And then I study him. He’s also wearing bug spray, and I don’t mean that he’s sprayed it onto his skin, but that they’re strung around him in a long necklace. Over ten of them that I can see, just draped around his neck, all sizes Off and Deet and Ben’s and Repel.

‘Excuse me,’ he repeats when I can’t find a proper response. ‘I noticed you don’t have the proper protection against them.’

Huh?

His sunshaded face and half-smile intermittently appear among the dangling swaying bottled chemicals.

‘What…what?’ I ask.

It’s the only word I can squeeze past my confusion.

He cocks his head as if confused by my confusion. ‘You can’t get through them without something,’ he explains, pointing toward the bird-infested parking lot. ‘And they don’t make bird repellent, so…’

The hawk is perched on a streetlight above them, as if lording over them, or maybe… controlling them?

‘Heads up!’

Huh? Oompf. I’m struck by something hard. A small bottle of bug spray, of course.

‘Um, thanks?’ I say.

He nods. Smiles wider. ‘Your porch is the only safe place, Miss.’

‘My… porch?’

‘You better hurry,’ he continues without explanation. ‘Sun’s almost gone.’

Okay. I slowly reverse over the speed hump, now more unsettled by the strange boy with sunshades and bug sprays than I am by the crows who seemed to have inched closer to our cars as we talked, like a giant growing, flowing ink spot.

Once clear of the car next to me, I turn around and tear out of this parking lot, out of this story, and head the hell home…

…silently followed by that single hawk and its murder of crows.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Jenny Morelli is a NJ high school English teacher who lives with her husband, cat, and myriad yard pets. She seeks inspiration in everything, including her nightmares. She’s published in several literary magazines including Spillwords, Red Rose Thorns, Scars tv, Bottlecap Press and Bookleaf Press for four poetry chapbooks. Website: JennyMorelliWrites.com