Gasp!
Jenny’s head was throbbing.
She attempted a cartwheel on the grass (after placing her horse down) but her legs swung too low. Still, she jumped around all over the place. Not even her backpack she had fetched from her hospital room could hold her down. She tossed it in the sky and caught it.
“I bet you could pick up the car, Jeez.” He hesitated in front of the driver’s door.
“I’ll try!” She crouched with her hands underneath the body of the car.
“Careful!”
She tried.
“Ow!” she leaned against the car. She winced bitterly and clutched her right shoulder.
He opened the back door. She entered gently, finally, but even after he ensured she buckled herself in, she seemed to hover a little bit. Before they took off, he removed his ashtray and emptied it out onto the grass at the bottom of the hill. “Just so you know, I only litter at dumps like this place.”
“Hey, So you’re Santa,” In the driver’s mirror he watched a sly yet admiring smile glint at him.
The comic artist looked less like a tin candy box Mr. Holly Jolly and more like the mix between a carnival barker and a cowboy dipped in a tar pit. On the seat next to him was a stout black hat. He had black, straight oily hair like hers. His face looked like he had considered then reconsidered growing a mustache. He wore a ruffled shirt collar under a black vest under a darker deerskin coat with thick seams between the coarse leather. He reminded her of too many types of characters: the vagabond, the wizard, the tradesman. She sneered in a kindly way, “You look like a yokel.”
Santa had given Rosalyn a few things other than the comics, but until today, all he knew was that Rosalyn needed support in certain ways not even her relatives could give. It was personal. Every pre-holiday she had phoned him up for the weirdest questions.
“Are you able to hot glue glow sticks together? Would it be poisonous?”
“Are there any curse words in a Rock and Roll Album?” (Upon request for specification: ‘Sister…. Rosetta Tharpe, Rosetta Tharpe’)
“Could you send me a list of animals that did not go through evolution? Or better yet just give me a list of the fake animals, that should be shorter.”
“What’s the most feminine sport’s ball? I’m asking because you would know more about sports than me.”
a few weeks later: “Why didn’t you tell me that rock and roll lady was colored?” “Perhaps, it doesn’t matter, I just wanted to be informed.”
“I have a six year, seven, eight, nine year old cousin who’s having a birthday, Christmas, back to school thing. Can you send some stuff?
To Jenny, the thing about him that made him look better than Santa is that he looked real, like he had real thoughts and feelings, real clothes, dark skin with circles under his eyes just like her.
“We look alike, that must mean there’s two yokels in this car.”
“Huh? me?” She had one of those hindsight and subsequent oops kind of laughs then cut herself off. “Irregards, You wanna get a hotdog or hamburger? I haven’t eaten anything real in a lifetime.”
He belatedly choked on air when she said “‘irregards” “There’s… excuse me, food on the train.” He said in a crooked tone
“The train?” she squealed. “We’re going on a train?” He nodded. She was shaking.
As they pulled onto the highway, Vincent resorted to his ritual of turning the dial right and left for a classical station but a little radio station in the back talked rapidly above every one.
“Do you have a dog? Do you like animals? So you’re an alien expert? What’s science fiction? Fictional science? If you could go on a planet, which one would you go to? If you could be a monster, which one would you be? What presents do you get for Christmas?”
So he twisted the volume at the front all the way down.
“What movies do you watch?”
“Hardly any.”
“Golly goodness,” she muttered. “What music do you listen to? Good Golly Goodness if you don’t listen to music!”
Just hearing that alliterated phrase made him fantasize about teaching her to cuss creatively so he’d never hear that again. “I do, Anything your mom doesn’t.”
She laughed. “This is fun. Wanna go to the zoo? Wanna go to a museum? Wanna go camping? Wanna play I Spy? I love your drawings.”
“Sure, yes, Thank you. Would you like to be a comic book artist?”
She curled up in her seat, looking down at her laced fingers “Well it’s plausible, erm… I want to be a ballerina, and I wanna be a scientist, and a detective, and a horseback rider! I could do comics too, on the side.”
“Which one captures your heart most?”
She groaned “Humph, people keep asking me that…”
“Does that question exhaust you?”
“Not really, but kind of. I want to be so many things.”
“I respect that.”
It began raining softly.
She traced the sky on the humid window. “That’s cirrus, that’s stratus, that’s cumulus, and that’s cumulonimbus.”
In the mountain passes they crossed Radio towers, soap operas, telephone wires in the rain. Someone spray painted ‘Miss America’ with white paint on a concrete telephone wire in the rural outskirts of Amherst.
She said in a different meek voice “Can I sit in the front?”
“Sure.”
“Yes!”
“You wouldn’t believe it, but there was a fire over there.” she announced while they passed a seemingly random patch of woods and then at the valley they reached the agriculture zone. “Are there corn fields where you live?”
“No, I think you’re going to be completely surprised by what you see. You’ll think you’ve been abducted by aliens, it’s very science fiction there.”
After an enrapt gasp, she fell completely silent.
He turned the radio on. Flocks of birds flew over the swooping telephone wires. The curves of the road rose and drooped like sleeping eyelids all in sotto unchained melodies. Jenny had never been confronted with the dilemma of wanting to look out the window and wanting to look at the person inside the car. She switched back and forth. Spying for forest creatures, and secrets. She saw a pair of reading glasses inside his jacket button hole. They saw two deer.
She felt like anything beside the car was staring through the windows at them. No past or present witnesses, human or forest creature could understand how equally free as the birds and the deer she felt.
Nobody would ever believe that Jenny escaped, that she got abducted by aliens. It wasn’t normal that she got away… This wasn’t meant to happen, this went against the laws of nature.
The past was a summer cabin and she was walking into the woods of a new forest. Riding along she could see beside herself, outside the memories, the dolls, the textbooks, the candy canes, the talks about doomsday between crossword puzzles and crotchet, … now growing distant.