katabasis

by Elodie Ashcroft

“Bit scared,” says the little girl in the back seat. Her lip trembles in beautiful uncertainty, and I know this because I’m not really looking at the road. She does not understand the world she has tumbled into. The madness of reality has not become her second nature. She has not grown numb to the idea that someday, she and everyone she knows will die. Death, like the falling night, is not a riddle she has given up on solving.

“I’ll hold your hand when we stop at the light,” I tell her. I try to telegraph something in my voice that will keep us both from screaming.

“Lights gone out.”

“Not all of them.” Perhaps she means the sky has gone out. But the ugly traffic lights remain, the lights that stop and start us, that take our choice away.

“Bit scared,” she insists, as though I have not really answered her question.

“We’ll be home soon.” I roll right on red without stopping, a bit desperate. The child is a time bomb, and if she starts to wail, we are both lost. We drive through dark roads that leak into fenced fields, the scruffy edges of suburbia that stink of tortured poultry.

“Bit scared!” she says, and I reach back to pat her. She grabs my hand. “Mommy hold hand!” I slip my fingers from her tight grip before the light turns green.

“We’re almost home, I promise.”

“Bit scared.”

“You don’t like driving at night.” I say this to validate her feelings, and because I cannot change that we must drive through darkness. I try to impress rationality upon a mind that sees the world for what it is—a blankness confettied with chaos.

The city sprawl hugs us tighter, constricts our chests, pens us in, six-dollar-a-gallon gas churning into the air at stoplight after stoplight, energy pumping into entropy, potential stalling out and then renewed, minute by minute A lifetime bleeding out into this locked grid of dying trees, cement, and tar. The arrhythmic lurching of my heart marks the quarter-seconds. Miles tick up against the dashboard. The smell of petrol mixes with damp, heavy grass and shoveled-up dirt. Fear slips into my chest, a foreign thing, the thumping of an injured bird. A creature wild and strange has clawed its way inside me just to die. It succumbs slowly, thrashing around inside the warm cavity of my chest.

“Go!” screams the child. I almost hit the accelerator. I look up. The light is crimson, but I don’t remember stopping.

“Bit scared,” says the child.

“I’m right here.”

“No see.”

“But I’m right here.”

I drive with distracted caution through this sea of slow right angles, this metal across the soul, this dental apparatus that crams the city into straight rows of rotting teeth. A filigree mesh impressed upon the brain, a mixture of numbness and despair, panic and frantic pumping, with nothing in between. A little longer, I pray. May I endure a little longer.

When my words have run into fumes, we mount the driveway.

“This not my house!” shrieks the child.

Photo of Elodie Ashcroft

BIO: Elodie Ashcroft is a teacher of French and English and a writer of poems, stories, and novels-in-progress. When she’s not reading for work or fun, she takes a hike.