Thomas Mixon
Bad Vibe
Seals aren’t that big, and it can’t be a seal, you think, because you are hundreds of miles from shore. It’s definitely not a beaver, it has far less hair, fur. But maybe your impression was off. You are/were driving sixty-eight miles per hour, making the trip back down the highway after dropping your child off at school. You use cruise control because why think about speed, when there are other things to think about? Like this, the strange roadkill this morning, another one, now, larger than the first, glistening, wet despite the summer-long drought.
You are now going sixty-three miles per hour because cars in front of yours are slowing down. There are no body parts strewn across the road, but there’s some traffic, because even though they have perished in the breakdown lane, they take up quite a bit of space. Were they hit by a vehicle? If so, why are there no streaks of matter across the dashed lines? It’s like they crawled up from the shrubs, over the guardrail, and opened themselves, split, on the side of the road. There is blood, but it pools by the mile markers, neat and tidy, but with increasing volume, since, here, the biggest one yet, and, up there, you see, less than a hundred feet forward, another.
The car you are driving is a new model, and the cruise control automatically adjusts for cars going slower than the speed you’ve set. You can see you are now driving forty-four miles per hour, though your feet have not touched the brake. You didn’t have a good feeling about your old car, which ran fine, but stuck out like a, you think, ‘dead animal’ rather than ‘sore thumb,’ during your child’s kindergarten drop-off. So you traded it in for a hybrid and financed the balance. You didn’t have a good feeling about the salesman, but you really liked his shoes, and so you stared at them, the dark leather, the whole time you signed the papers.
The roadkill is now appearing every fifty feet or so, growing in size with each carcass. They are still up against the guardrail, but their heft is now blocking all but one lane. Everyone else has pulled over, between the lifeless forms, and are leaving their cars, climbing atop the obstructions.
No cars are in front of you. You are now driving twenty-one miles per hour. The proximity cameras notify you with all sorts of beeps and flashing lights. But your vehicle continues, swerving when necessary. You didn’t have a good feeling about the school your child was supposed to go to. Either they were planning to teach things you didn’t agree with, or they purposely were not teaching things you thought definitely should. You can’t remember now. You only recall the bad vibe, sitting in the cafeteria, on the little chairs built into the table, at the parent info night before the summer break. A man, maybe the principal, was trying to explain how the school was run, and when he said, “Look around, get to know each other. This will be your family for the next thirteen years,” you almost ran out.
You are now driving thirteen miles per hour. Ahead, something as large as an elephant, but wetter, shinier, appears to hinder all further progress. Your car inches up to it. The day after the parent info night, the blank checks arrived in the mail. You aren’t stupid, you knew it wasn’t money for free, but you had a good feeling about them. They were so blank. Even though you added a lot of zeros after the initial 1, to the amount to be borrowed, there was an even bigger zero, on the front of the offer. No interest for eighteen months. Eighteen months is more than a year; you remember thinking. Aren’t you different from who you were, last September? Doesn’t something happen, many somethings, every year, that you had no inkling would happen, events you couldn’t possibly have prepared for? It seemed like neglect, not to take advantage of the checks, not to enroll your child in the private school, miles away, not to get away, as fast as possible, from the desiccated men and women making small talk by the vending machines. Why were there vending machines, broken anyway, in an elementary school?
The car has finally stopped. The mass impedes your view of asphalt, sky, or anything on either side. From this close, you can see now, you were wrong. They aren’t dead. Their skin shivers, slightly, rhythmically. Your engine turns off, and grows cold as you watch the thing in front of you pulse faster, the partition in its body growing wider. You were wrong. These things are very much alive. These things would change everything if everything already weren’t changed.
The animal gives birth, its offspring landing on your windshield. The baby looks like a very small thing. But as soon as it takes its first breath, it grows.
Thomas Mixon has fiction and poems published in Miniskirt Magazine, Ripe Fiction, Bridge Eight, and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @truckescaperamp.