RECALCULATING
Word Count: 466
After it happened we all stood around and asked the inevitable What? Jessie said it was karma and Roxanne said it was the way the sun hit the frog pond at twelve noon that day.
I decided it was likely just the hypertext syndrome. I mean, had we taken a left after the bridge, we never would have ended up here in the back roads of Vermont somewhere up by the Canadian border.
Or, if I’d gotten a new GPS system the Voice would have known we’d missed our turn to the Cape and would have recalculated. I swear the bitch never was pleasant about things like that and with age, she might have just missed it herself or gotten fed up with directions I often ignored and so ignored my wrong turn out of spite.
I pulled over and we all got out of the car, four doors opening in sync as if choreographed by the great Balanchine. A sandaled foot hitting pavement or grass, tentative, wondering, awed and delighted and yes, a little bit scared.
Pink trees and blue fields and a sky decidedly green. The change had been rather gradual, true; a look at that! sort of hesitant awareness. All of a sudden the world as you know it is gone, slipped through your conscious certainty, falling like a broken puzzle into something unknown.
We were like little kids at the zoo. Tugging each other one way and the other, a slow-stepped walk through a carnival drawn by the lights and the music and wonderful things that were going on all around. Screeches, Looks!, sudden stops where we ran into each other like Larry, Moe, and Curly in the old movies. A camel flew overhead, pretty high up but it sure was a camel. A pelican roared out of the woods. Jessie suggested we’d had a bad accident and Sharon, the quiet one of the four, blessed herself and said, “Yeah, we’re dead.”
I don’t know how long we wandered but we never lost sight of the car–which had turned into a pumpkin at some point–though I have to say now what I wouldn’t say then, that I felt a strange sense of contentment, familiarity, belonging almost.
“Let’s go,” said Roxanne, and we all got back into the pumpkin, surprised to find that my key still started the engine. I made a U-turn and though we watched hard, drove slowly, and searched for that one magic moment that made it all change, we just came back to our regular old green-grass and blue-sky world without crossing a line.
I’ve gone back up that way through the years but never quite found it again. My new GPS lady’s more focused and the Voice won’t tell me the way.
