Night Highways
- Dec 7, 2018
- 3 min read
by Jeanne Mack
We had a not-so-fast car that shuddered and shook down monumental, mostly-wild interstates in the early dark that came slipping over us as the natural progression after a purple, golden twilight. We had rock-stack mountains rising, throwing red-tinged shadows into the feathery field, visible in silhouette as we bumped Paul’s favorite Hold Steady album and I ate gas-station sour candy, sticky between my fingers. Spread out, in the back seat, after a lackluster eighth-place race finish, I closed my eyes and could barely stay awake.
We changed positions, we stopped for more snacks and water. We had Paul’s toes on the gas pedal, we had mine, dusty, on the dashboard. We had whole desert in the rearview, had it spreading at our shoulders, nothing but sameness repeating over and over. We hardly noticed any of it, we couldn’t make ourselves look outward, at the surroundings when all we wanted was to be home.
We stopped for pizza in a tiny town, overstuffed ourselves with three slices each, and got back in the car. We had podcasts and conversations, music, and me reading aloud to help Paul stay awake as he kept driving.
We were getting closer, only a few more hours til we were back, then five more hours til morning light. We’d run out of things to say and we were silent, our minds desperate for sleep. We cut our brights for oncoming cars, and even when we were alone on the road, we forgot to put them back on, and drove in relative darkness, with the stars working their ancestral magic.
We had heavy lids, hurrying to our bed back home, leaving a weekend, a race in Colorado, behind. We had the stress of returning to life at home, the things we’d left behind hanging over us. We had impatience and sore legs, aching butts; we didn’t want to be back to our real life, but we also couldn’t get there fast enough. We had our car, streaming, slipping, shuddering just outside the Arizona line.
Our bodies were spectral and shadowy in the silvery starlight and the moon shined from behind a cloud. Paul had eyes that all of a sudden saw something in our lane, emerging from the night’s black, stepping hoof-first to asphalt. He saw them right in front of us — so close — and he jammed on the brakes.
My eyes snapped open and I saw too — or was I dreaming? — that they had hides and haunches that moved, but didn’t. They had glinting manes that froze, still for an infinite second in our headlight beams. They had come from nowhere, from the peripheral darkness at the highway’s sides. They’d emerged from the land that we could no longer see at all, and hadn’t noticed enough when we could, but that still existed out there anyway, beside the road. They arrived quickly — from that dark oblivion into soft, grayscale flesh before us. They were immaterial, barely real in the wind, but they were so, so tall. 1, 2, 3, maybe a 4th — a foal, I think. Inches away, not feet.
Did they see us? We had blinking eyeballs. Shocked to remember, or to realize for the first time, that wild, midnight horses were there, in the darkness alongside us. They could step into our world at any moment. We blinked too long and braked, shimmying, screeching, braking. I held my breath as we skidded toward their bodies.
They had orb eyes that glowed — milky shadows, tinted fishbowls. They were not the scared ones; we were. They waited, and our car shrieked to a stop — Paul’s mouth a tight line and mine suddenly gaping open, involuntarily.
Their ropes of horsehair brushed against our car’s side-view mirror as they calmly floated back to the darkness on the other side of the road. As if none of it had ever happened.
We’d barely registered in their awareness. And it was clear that before they’d appeared, we hadn’t considered they might exist at all. As they left, we looked around, outward from within the center of our car’s metal shell, and wondered what else might exist there. In the wide, open space around us.
Jeanne Mack lives, writes, and runs in Brooklyn, where she works as a freelance copywriter and content strategist. She has had poetry, flash fiction, and nonfiction previously published in Mid-American Review, Dime Show Review, Trampset, TEMPO, Ciele Journal, and Meter Magazine. She was the 2017 Winner of the Charles E. Bull Award for Creative Writing in Poetry, and a finalist for the 2017 Fineline Competition judged by Diane Seuss. She hates to admit it, but she doesn’t really like coffee.
