Fiction 3 Page 2

We backed out of the parking lot and started down the mountain. The snow was picking up, weighing on the windshield wipers. My dad
opened the window a crack and some snow shot back into my face. I moved to the other side. He sat up real straight in his seat and spit
thick black tobacco spit out the window onto the pavement. We were driving slow and cars were piling up behind us.

“I taught our boy all about the Continental Divide,” my dad said.

“Did you, now?” my mom said.

“He didn’t know the physics of it. Fascinating stuff, when you think about it.”

We passed a sign that read Overlook Ahead 500ft. We came around the corner and saw another big iron sign with an area to pull off the
road and look at something.

“We’ll overlook that overlook,” my mom said. Another explosion of laughter from the front seats. I pulled my hat down tighter over my
head.

“But it’s pretty profound, if you really think about it.” My dad was getting philosophical. He did this sometimes. “Me, I’m just one man,
but now there’s part of me everywhere. Going to flow all over the country, out into both oceans. Hell, maybe some of it end up in Japan,
some of it in England. Maybe meet back up in Australia or something.”

“You should have done it too,” my mom said, looking back at me. “How often do you get an opportunity like that?”

“I told him to. He was bladder shy. Too many people around, he said.”

“Oh honey,” she said, reaching back, taking off my hat and smoothing my hair down, “you’re never going to see any of those people
again.”

We came to a straight place on the road, and the first car behind us floored it to get by. It was a big orange SUV. There was a girl in the
back seat; she looked a few years older than me, probably in high school already. She looked right at me and smiled. And I thought about
never seeing those people again.

In that one electric second of eye contact I could see her life and mine, bright pulsing cords stretching out into the endless, twisting and
writhing and never touching except for once, this one instant on the road in the snow in Colorado. The cords touched tangentially in an
explosion of light and fire, and then hers spun away from mine, unspooling endlessly into the black, infinitely far away while mine kept
grinding on alongside my parents’.

Maybe we cross again. Maybe I run over her cat in a neighborhood in Montana and walk door to door with the body until I find her for the
tearful apology. Maybe she sells me a ticket to a Broadway show in New York. Or our eyes meet again, sixty years from now, across the
deck of a dolphin tour boat in the Gulf in Florida while the seagulls squawk overhead.
Maybe I marry her. Maybe I never see her again.

That girl would love to talk to me about this kind of thing. My parents wouldn’t. My dad would find some way to turn the explosion of light
and fire into a dirty joke. My mom would ask me what tangential means.

The snow came in heavy through the crack in the window and soaked the seat beside me. My dad leaned out to spit. He had his hand on
the shifter and my Mom’s hand was on top of his. Outside the window the trees creaked under the ice, the wind carried snow into the upper
layers of the atmosphere and back, and beneath frozen surfaces, ancient creeks rushed my dad’s piss in opposite directions to opposite
oceans.

I pulled myself deeper into my jacket and watched the valleys slide past outside the window and thought, maybe that’s as profound as life
gets.