The Way it Goes
by: Lance Cheng
I.
Tuesday morning, the world hadn’t ended for anyone but me.
It was deathly cold and she didn’t bother with a scarf, just drank the ice off the windshield through cracked lips and convinced herself it tasted like something, blood or earth or rot. Last resorts were the reality she’d learned to embrace, and they had carved her into the shape of a bottomless hunger. So she savored without savoring. Consumed without consuming.
Tuesday morning, the world hadn’t ended for anyone but me.
It was deathly cold and she didn’t bother with a scarf, just drank the ice off the windshield through cracked lips and convinced herself it tasted like something, blood or earth or rot. Last resorts were the reality she’d learned to embrace, and they had carved her into the shape of a bottomless hunger. So she savored without savoring. Consumed without consuming.
II.
A long time ago, there was a first stop, then a second. Then one more, one more, just one more. She had wanted me to fill the passenger seat, and who was I to refuse? That was when I still thought that
we could chase destiny and catch it, that she had chosen me for a reason.
Tuesday morning, I got in the car again, and she said, Just one more. So we drove, as we always had. It could have been beautiful if it were not so uneconomical, a responsibility with an empty weight and a vague guilt for it.
I asked, Do you ever think you’ve forgotten to do something? Or rather, do you ever think you’ve forgotten something and been left helpless to it?
She shrugged.
What she meant was, We’ve killed our time. Let’s waste some more.
III.
The road forked into three. One was dust, one was dirt, and one was a little of both. We got out, soles flashing browner and browner with every step. She started talking about one road or another, which one was which and which one wasn’t, but my eyes were watering, and the roads all blurred into one, diagonals on diagonals. The horizon teetered like a spinning top.
Go on, it said. Take your best guess.
IV.
It was a terrible vertigo. The way I kept waiting for the world to end.
We were going nowhere, and we were less us and more hyphenate, and only one of us liked to drive. I loved her, I did, but I wanted to set myself upright, and I wanted us to have found utopia already, and somewhere in my crooked head, destiny had become fate and the finish line was the end of everything.
V.
It was not Tuesday morning anymore.
The yolk of the sun had burst and run down, and the world still hadn’t ended yet. So I burned it at the stake, the wicked, wicked thing.
So when she tasted the icy dirt, maybe the earth was not so delectable after all. So I was the same rubble, burning or not. So no one wants to ride with a dead man, but a passenger is a passenger.
So we were going nowhere, so we were always going nowhere, so I said, Be the undertaker, dear. But don’t you open my eyes.
About the Author
Lance Cheng is a graduate of Hunter College High School and a data and computer science student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He enjoys writing poetry, code, and literary (over)analysis of video games. Find him on the Internet at withoutanyparticularwonder.substack.com.