Hairpin Curve

The night he drives off the road he’s drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels. His art work doesn’t sell well in Manhattan. But here, alone in the desert, his vision is understood. His eye roams over small hills and catches the Joshua trees and Brittlebush rising. The sun tumbles fast into the sand.

The night he takes out the guardrail he laughs and hollers to the asphalt to let him pass. The desert darkness is comfortable, an old friend’s embrace. The winding canyon walls are large granite hands of God to catch him if he should round a corner too fast, with only a scraped fender and a blown out tire as the cost of his loss of faith.

Surely, no fatalist will take the bet that he will fly through the window glass. Mick Jagger gargles from stereo speakers into the night. Another swig from the bottle brings a pleasant burn, and he remembers a cleric’s claim that to kneel before the altar and offer loyalty to the invisible are all you need to meet with grace the boulders far below the hairpin curve with your hands off the steering wheel, smiling.

Miles up, between desert and stars, a jet passes. A small boy looks out from a window seat, sees a tiny geyser of glitter in the dark landscape below. He makes the sign of the cross on his shirt like Grandma showed him, though if you asked him, he could not say why.