n. The chief of many mechanical devices enabling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off.
—Ambrose Bierce
Sheltering at her place during Tropical Storm Fay
my now-ex sister-in-law posits, we girls have to
have our own cash, calls it, midnight train money
for when things go bad as she finishes folding
a fitted sheet, adds it to the basket and laments her
current stash—more like midnight scooter money—
and I’m fixed on memory’s twisted tracks, driven
past the snarl of times I’ve been broke, broken and
trapped, landing last in Mom’s 1992 living room
knee fractured, red streaks still peppered through
a nest of hair that hasn’t seen a shower since last
week’s car crash. In two days, I’ll take a plane to
Orlando instead, and Mom keeps asking why
I want to leave. Fluent in generational silence
I stare at the dotted chalkboard of night sky beyond
the window while she vents, christens the accident
omen—God telling me not to go. Her final fox-trap
of logic: There’s no geographical solution to a
problem, you know, because your feelings follow
wherever you go. Stalled on her plaid couch now
I swallow a sea of stones, forbid the ripples to
show, don’t mention Dad or brother who’ve
already flown from home, rendering me
boxcar, waiting for the engine of eighteen.
