Hilary Swank & Speeding Cars

When we were eleven and almost asleep, the headlights from cars going south would interrogate the contents of your room. A swift and blinding light would sweep from one side to the next through the big window facing the driveway as cars turned onto your street. You snored quietly next to me. Your gauzy curtains welcomed the glare as I burrowed deeper into my sleeping bag with the plaid interior and broken zipper. The cough of a revving engine would come pealing down Cassidy Street, and my half-awake young self would brace for impact and think, this is the end. So we die when a car crashes through your window, runs us over, stretches us out like putty on the worn carpet of your bedroom floor.

The timing would be tragic. To think that after watching Boys Don’t Cry and eating a pack of Oreos, you told me that you didn’t have a crush on Dylan from class. But every girl had a crush on Dylan from class. I did. You shrugged and threw out the idea that you liked girls, as if holding up a hanger on which something better suited to your body hung, and that was fine with me.

I hoped that our lives wouldn’t end there, on the edge of understanding, by the carelessness of a speeding driver barreling into a corner house on a busy street. At the crime scene, police shoes would crunch over pebbles of glass and our half-eaten sleeve of cookies. They’d find parallel tire tracks along our spines, Xs over our eyes, and tongues splayed to one side, flattened images like cartoons. Everyone would leave flowers in your front yard for us. Dylan would bring some if I was lucky, and maybe Hillary Swank would come to mourn you too.

My grandpa had died earlier that year all alone. At least I wouldn’t be alone in death; I’d have you too.

It would only last for seconds, this hurtling of light exploring the walls of your room, the mechanical rumble of speed. Fear is a temporary childhood thing — an unwavering thing for the older — I now know. The motor would pass and fade down Horne street. And I’d wade back into the shallow end of dreams.

G.T. Gordon is a writer in Long Beach, California. She has studied English, film, and music and recently received her MFA in creative writing at Chapman University. Her writing usually explores the tangled relationship that binds reality, memory, and perception. Her work has been published in L.A. Record, Harbor Review, and is forthcoming with Porkbelly Press. You can connect with her on Instagram @g.t.gordon or on her website, gtgordon.com.