DEAD DECEIVING

Oh, to be behind a wheel and think that you have so much control. To drive thru your life with a comfort as deep as a plush cloth-covered carseat. To make your own destiny by turning a steeringwheel. To make others jump by honking the horn. To be in complete control of color and extras. To push a button and call up a wide spectrum of music. To know you're in complete control. To be so incredibly wrong.

The sun is an orange ball so big but so far away. It is a bounce away from vanishing behind a hill. A freezing wind tries to blow it out but it's too far away for that. There is so much white snow around that things would be bright enough without a sun. A lone car rips up the light snow, shooting it out behind as if it were curses, or entire books of breath. The car is sleek and knows how to laugh at the frozen wind. The man behind the wheel of the car is so relaxed and confident that if you asked him if there was a road beneath him he wouldn't even know what you were talking about.

His car becomes him. Its bright color vanishes in the snow, which knows all and hides all. Like everyone else who ever thought he was in complete control, this man is dead wrong.

The snow is hiding something as white and cold and wispy as itself. The snow hides a phantom Winnebago that glows white and vibrating. Like an animal call played on a brass baritone, the Flying Dutchman of the Plains shakes off the white clouds of snow that enshroud it and wheels a path upon a horizon distant but getting closer.

So thick it forgets everything, snow breathes up the air and holds tight onto every detail in the landscape. Despite the fact that the driver of the lone fast car thinks he knows everything about driving and believes that every single bit of his destiny depends on his own courage and muscular strength, the snow adds up to one thing. The world and its four directions are all so white that they're flat and deceptive. He presses his foot into the floor but all that extra speed doesn't make any difference. Snow falls whiter than ever and shoots straight in and out of his headlights.

Trying to fill in all the spaces between itself, the snow falls. It wants to build a uniform whiteness; it is trying its very hardest to completely take over from the blackness of the night. Blades of snow cut into the road ahead. Subtly, small flat white six-sided six-pointed daggers slice thru the windshield and into the driver's eyesight. He bats his eyes more often but doesn't let up on the gas. He is trying to eat up the road. Meanwhile, unknown to him, the snow is trying to eat him up.

Greasing the pan, the roads, the world, comes the Flying Dutchman of the Plains. It shoots by in a laugh and keeps on shooting, just the way the sky keeps shooting snow and ice. The driver flicks his eyes again, on and off, trying to overcome the white with the black inside his eyelids. Try as he might to get rid of it, he just plain can't and that's the way it should be, for that is really what he is seeing and hearing. The sky shoots down snow the size of small snowballs - the size of bullets, and somehow something is laughing - not an evil laugh but a regular hilarious laugh, like after a good joke.

Somehow he can't help but see a white Winnebago holding hands with the snow and getting darker and brighter but always staying exactly in the same place in front of him, as if it were floating and directly tied to the speed of his car. His mind tries to wander back but he has completely forgotten his childhood. He hopes to hear something to tell him otherwise but he isn't even on the highway and he keeps going, very fast, as his car hits things and sears thru the snow. He doesn't know it but the faint vehicle in front of him is leading him, or else he's leading it. The bumping knocks things off his car and bams his head up against the ceiling and then the whole front face of his car knocks into something, maybe a big rock set up by nature, maybe a roadblock of some kind set up by himself, and he feels his car erupt from underneath him. His foot loses the gas pedal because he's shooting up into the sky. The snow curls and flaps around him like white wings and he thinks he's going to heaven but then gravity grabs him by the ankle and pulls him back down to the ground, beating him as if he were a carpetbeater shaking clouds of white dust out of a white carpet, and instead of going to heaven he makes a grease-spot on the white white snow as his car blooms like a golden orange flower of spring nearby.

Copyright 2003 John Akre

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