Down The Road
by Kim Chinquee
I drive around in my polka-dotted Kia to find the place that dyes my hair to make it longer. I buy expensive products that make me speak another language and the hairdressers follow me out at closing. I put my purchases in my trunk, but it won't close because there's a cow in it drinking brandy. One of the hairdressers lives next to the beauty parlor, and I hear her play my boyfriend's prints on her piano.
He reminds me of a neighbor who had a moustache and dark hair and he wore a leather jacket. Once I talked with him in his kitchen and he drove me home on his cycle. He drove fast and in-and-out and I held onto his jacket.
I baby sat for my neighbors' babies. I was better with babies than my sister. The babies' father was a man who liked my body. He took pictures and sent them to Indiana.
I get my trunk shut and after I get home, I take out my products. The cow is gone, but in the trunk there's vomit. My car rolls forward into a fat man. I see him falling. My car moves into somone's garage door. I don't know whose. He gets up and then his wife comes out. Both of them are big and I can't see past their size. They're yelling at me. They tell me I'm not friendly.
My dad got schizophrenic and my mom left him. There was so much meat in the freezer: heart and tail and liver, every kind of steak. Cow tongue from my favorite, Iona. I'd petted her in the summertime, sneaking weeds to her under the fence. My parents sold the farm and since I went with my mother, my grandparents disowned me. They sold everything. They sold everything. They sold everything.
My sister manages a bank and drives a big car. She's married with a daughter. She and I would run in snow, then fall to make angels. We had warm coats and hats, hand-me-downs from our cousins who grew fields of sunflowers. At my grandmother's funeral, there's a closed casket, but pictures of my grandmother are all over. My sister tells me I look just like my grandma, with her Norweigian features. My cousins wear nice clothes and all I can remember are sunflowers and hand-me-downs. They tell me I am Hilda. Everyone talks. Everyone talks except my father. He paces around like he forgot his medication. He stares at my son, calling me something I probably can't remember.
I drive to Terre Haute. My son is my boyfriend and my boyfriend is my son. We stop for hamburgers but don't eat meat. The car turns over and we all get out, brushing snow from our clothes. We run around, falling in fields of straw mittens. We sit waiting for summer, getting sick on tic-tacs, sticking our fingers in imaginary pockets.
Kim Chinquee's work has appeared in Conjunctions, Noon, Denver Quarterly, elimae, Quick Fiction, Mississippi Review, Fiction International, and in several other journals. She has just been awarded a Pushcart Prize. She teaches creative writing at Central Michigan University.