“Loretta and Mike”

 The dry heat in the car allowed the smell of the rotting banana peel on the back seat to linger in the air, making it all the more potent.  Bananas and cigarettes: the first things Loretta consumed after she found out the news that she had lost the baby.  The infant in her had died so she furiously ate the banana she had saved to be “healthy for the baby” and then smoked a cigarette to ease her misery. Mike sat next to her with his hands at 10 and 3.  He was always a responsible driver, would have made a great Dad.  Their silence mirrored the thicket of snow that embraced their car, the way a mother embraced her newborn child.  The dark sky and the dense forest felt at once lonely and insulating.  It was midnight but both Loretta and Mike knew sleep was not an option.

Without turning her head or showing expression, Loretta broke the silence.  “We were supposed to make that last left, Mike,” she said in an empty voice.  Mike didn’t answer, just stared on, the moonlight illuminating his deadened face and his light green eyes.  Loretta breathed in the banana infused air, chest rising like the road ahead of her, climbing up the mountain, and then deliberately and heavily breathed out her apathy.  She ran her tongue over the enamel of her upper teeth and then stuck her right hand in her left front pocket.  She pulled out a crumpled glossy sheet of 3x4 paper.  Her eyes jetted from the blackness ahead of her to the black of the sonogram.  She felt the slip of the veneer of the paper and sighed, her head still down.  Still silent.

“WHAT THE FUCK???!!!!!” Mike screeched, tires screeched, Loretta screeched, breaks, sliding, breaks, sliding, STOP.

“What the hell was that????!!” Loretta attacked Mike.  “Are you still fucking drunk from the beer? Are you fucking kidding me, Mike?  What the hell was that?”

“Jesus Loretta, I’m not drunk.  I don’t fucking know.  It came out of nowhere.  I…I….I don’t know!”

Car doors slammed shut.  Two figures step out into the the white tundra.  The wind whipped in their faces blowing Loretta’s loose curly hair into a frenzied dance.  Mike squinted to see his headlights showering some kind of animal figure.  The rhythm of the crunch of the snow under the couple’s shoes felt like a final march to visit a deceased relative before he is buried.  The red blood splattered across the velvet white snow made Loretta shutter as she blindly felt for the picture of the sonogram in her pocket. 

A fawn.  White spotted back with light brown fur.  She looked perfect in all her stillness in the snow, her legs stretched outward, as if she was trying to make some kind of snow angel.  The sprinkled blood seemed to encircle her head just so to resemble a halo.  Loretta saw it and immediately began sobbing.  Her hot tears streamed down her cold face and then into the ruffle of her jacket collar.  She threw her arm into her pocket and ripped out the sonogram, hurling it into the cold wind.  The wind received it like a male dancer catching a twirling ballerina.  Choreography.  Loretta watched the paper playfully tumble on the snow’s surface whirling around and around.   The wind cried out and took the paper away, out of sight and out of mind.  There was nothing more to say or do but get back in the car and keep driving.