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________________short stories
Black Pines
She was shouting again. That much I could distinguish, though I couldn’t hear her. The loud guitar rifts of “My Chemical Romance” saw to that. My iPod had been at its maximum volume for nearly an hour now, about as long as Mother had been on the phone with baggage claim— for the third time.
“The plane didn’t even leave the deck! How could they possibly have been lost? Is that possible?”
Holiday traffic that Thanksgiving was as horrible as to be expected. We were supposed to take a plane out of Atlanta airport to a little regional airport in central Georgia, but a delay due to weather forced us to take an alternate means to get to my Grandmother’s house, the one on my father’s side. I watched the light rain slick down my back passenger window in runny sheets. The song on my mp3 device faded out slowly, consequently forcing me to listen to Mother for approximately ten to fifteen seconds, wondering how long she was able to speak in that angry hiss before she lost her voice entirely. It seemed to waver from the effort already.
Traffic outside was at a near standstill. It had been this way for nearly an hour and a half. Shifting in my seat, I turned to look out the back window, to the reverse side of the speed limit sign perhaps 100 feet behind us—the marker of where we were an hour before. I sighed and rolled back around in my seat. There was a cramp in my leg. The rental car my parents purchased had little legroom in the back, forcing me into a corner between the back of the seat and the door, propping my legs at an angle onto the cigarette dish. I had an ache in my neck from the shape of the seats.
“Hey, Mal. Look,” my father said, reaching back behind the seat to shake me to attention. He gestured out to the side of our car. I noticed we were moving forward more than we had in the last half-hour.
Dopey-eyed and nearly asleep despite my discomfort, I looked out my side window only to behold the cause of the dead-lock river of cars. Two eighteen-wheelers were parked in the middle of the three-lane highway, the first’s rear axle black with smoke and burn marks. Apparently, the axle had caught fire and the second truck stopped to help the driver. We could hear a police car whirr up the shoulder behind us. That entertained me for a while until I realized, twenty minutes later, that traffic was still bumper-to-bumper. I hunched down into the rental car’s seat and slept for about an hour. The black pines seemed ever-present, each mile of them identical to the last. The wind picked up outside, and their tall tips lashed at the sky like jagged razors, each harmonizing with the next.
“Thank God! Go go go!” I heard my mother say over the soft saxophone solo of Dave Matthews’s “#41.” I glanced up and took one earphone out of my ear. The traffic, after passing the accident, was breaking. Mother always had an eye for seizing opportunity, though however reckless. Manning the wheel over my father’s lap herself, she nearly sideswiped another SUV as she maneuvered the car into an exit lane before being held back by my father. The car turned up onto an exit ramp. I didn’t care which one it was at the time, just ecstatic to be clearing away from the stilled river of red brake lights, never mind that mother nearly caused an accident in holiday traffic. I stared over my shoulder for a while, watching the creek of cars become tiny and insignificant, eventually disappearing at the bottom of the hill behind the black bulkiness of the waterlogged pine peaks.
I felt sick to my stomach suddenly—that sinking, slightly nauseous feeling in the cavity of your abdomen where it is never clear whether your intestines are tying themselves in knots or whether you were going to throw up on the back of the false leather seats when the time was right. I had not noticed these trees until now, as if the physical presence of them, or the knowledge of their presence, was willfully pushed out of my mind and ignored. They were familiar to me—I’ve lived here before and I will reiterate that these masses of invaluable forest choked the land we knew as “Georgia”. Yet still, it was something to be avoided, something to be wary of and disgusted of, but not necessarily something to fear.
It began to drizzle again. The same haze that seemed to coat the sky in a phlegm-like film seemed to dominate the landscape as well. There were no hills in central Georgia, only long and gradual slopes that you could see off in the distance down the road but would not be able to distinguish if you were on one or not. Not even the endless expanse of the untouched pine forests alluded to where one was. Every mile of black bark and needled branches was, in essence, identical to the next, and the next, and the next. It was only after several minutes of forcing my head down between my knees, a feeble attempt to tear my mind away, that I could again hear my mothers voice, quizzing the baggage claim receptionist with questions I was certain there were no answers for. The brain began to throb.
It was unseasonably cold that Thanksgiving, especially for Georgia—the previous night’s frost had killed all but a few remains of color on the fringe of the road. What color there was had darkened into a deep, pine-needle green. The storm that cancelled our flight in Atlanta must have already passed through the area ahead of us, for the roadsides and ditches were clogged with fallen dark branches. They seemed to cluster together like a knotted, maltreated spider’s web where the current had rushed them together, gotten stuck in one way or another, and served as a skeleton dam for the small snaking of water downhill.
We stopped by a flaky clothes store around five in the afternoon once we got to Macon, since Wal-Mart was closed. My father grew up in an extremely small town and so many businesses shut their doors early for holidays. Dad dropped Mother and me off, where I went straight inside and to the back to rummage in the clearance rack. This was fine until I realized there was a leak in the ceiling that was dripping on the back of my jacket. I thought about telling the clerk that was working there at the time, but I thought against it. Maybe it was the exhaustion I was beginning to feel in my back and legs. Anything that may have prolonged my stay there was something to be avoided. We bought an outfit for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving dinner, hoping our baggage would be found before that.
As usual, she hurried me, whispering under her breath in a angry rasp how she would never picture herself in a backwoods store like this. Often, she would pick up her phone and dial up friends and coworkers from work, just to make her feel safe and “inside her box”, as dad put it.
I still had a cramp in my neck, I still had a sharp pain behind my eyes, and Mother was tending to her own shot nerves. We paid for our things above the hollow, high-class chirping of my mother, probably laughing at jokes that weren’t even funny. She was probably just thankful to be able to talk to someone other than her family.
The thick pine forests were held at bay by the 50’s style township buildings that always looked as if they were never considered for renovation. My parents began arguing again in the car. Mother was becoming restless and impatient—she hated travel, especially to her in-law’s house. She thought herself too high and mighty to spend a few days in a small Georgian town. She never said it aloud, but she was incredibly transparent when she was irritated. I retreated to the refuge of my headphones, not wanting to hear her nag to my father about how much work she could have gotten done by now or how her phone service didn’t work there. My father took it, a practice of patience and tolerance that came with time, earning him the nickname “Saint Bill” in the family. To the immediate family, he was a martyr saint that took the punishment so no one else would.
Whenever the music would drop out between tracks, I could hear their argument with the occasional raising of voices, though my father’s seemed softer and more rational despite the irritation that burned beneath the surface of his skin. He still hadn’t gotten over the near-accident out on the interstate, still cursing under his breath with incredulity. I tried to focus on the scenery that was passing by, zeroing in on the lyrics that usually seemed inaudible through the white earphones. Occasionally, I would spot a stranded, daunting pine tree along the road. As their voices rose and fell, the tree’s numbers seemed to multiply. My mother was talking about his family again—this time dad didn’t say anything. I shut my eyes and tried to resist the urge to unbuckle myself and kick the back of my mother’s seat all the way into the dash.
Eventually, I stopped looking out the window after I realized my heart was racing and I was shaking with an irrational anger—one, I knew, I didn’t have the courage to do anything about. I laid down, taking up the full length of the seat, which rolled back into an uncomfortable angle.
The forest reappeared and I closed my eyes, shrouded in a fitful darkness not too unlike the inky colonies of dark pine. Their peaks clawed at the dismal skyline as if they were disturbed by my passing. Perhaps they were merely laughing.
"Where has my heart gone?"
~Mallory W.
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