True Story - The Getaway Vehicle

We stood at the end of a driveway and sent a light camera into frigid skies not remotely the way in Bladerunner a pigeon flares above wet rooftop. (The ice, I said afterwards, reviewing the returns, it looks painted on. I gestured uselessly. They didn’t even feel like my own hands. It’s just amateur white dabbings onto an old photograph of water, I said. A trick, it looks to me. Brushstrokes rather than nights of on-shore wind).

You’d had enough of trickery, you said. You even angled away in light huff. Enough of the world in general. Would prefer to dwell on things maybe straightening out, because, well, weren’t the politicos coming somewhat to their senses, and even the weather was strong-arming everyone to stay in. You wished for a divining rod, you said, a telling switch of willow to point the way from an old field over-run with nettle.

Inside the house, a blur of brooms, as if in a silent film, a shattered couple shuttling back and forth, and damp-from-work hair being swept back throughout a frantic set of preparations for the imminent land cameras, and then likely a week of visitations before the abandonment of these fossil-stamped shores. A long portage up-river. A final decampment. A setting out for change.

I could have said some of these things, I suppose, but there was a key already in your hand. A getaway vehicle and an imagining, I imagined, of the route home, even a subtle leaning into the turns. The drone settled on the road behind us, slow as a mushroom. Propellors grinding down every word like so much coffee.