Saturday's Storyteller: "On those long country drives, I see the silhouette in the back seat."

by Belinda Roddie

On those long country drives, I see the silhouette in the back seat. It seems to have gotten smaller these days, though. Almost as if it, too, has become stooped with age, such as I have.

I have always had white hair. My friends used to call me the Human Cockatoo due to the way it rose like a bright firework from my head, infamously capable of defying gravity. I always liked it. My wife liked it, too. She said it made me look like Andy Warhol. Only unlike him, I was not a homosexual.

I had been driving my truck down a Nebraska road when I first heard the thump beneath my wheel. It had been admittedly dark, and my headlights had been flickering in and out, in and our, for the past hour of my trip. When I got out of the car, there didn't seem to be any sign of a stone, or a stick, or an animal, or any object that would have disturbed my car. I let my hands listlessly paw through my own rocket of hair, exhaled, and went back to my seat, only to find a young girl sitting behind me before I even touched the steering wheel.

"You hit me," she said to me.

I froze. I had not seen her body beneath my truck. I turned around and stared at her. She was pale, and very small, with lots of curls assembling across the nape of her neck. She appeared unscathed.

"I beg your pardon?"

She sniffled. "Why would you hit your own daughter?"

I did not have a daughter. My wife, bless her heart, could not conceive due to ovarian cancer, something she had miraculously survived. I began to drive, slowly at first, then faster and faster as my boot shook against the gas pedal. The girl did not move.

"Who are you?" I demanded.

"I told you," she replied, her voice flat and almost inhuman. "I'm your daughter."

"I have no child."

"You do," said the girl, tilting her head. "And you hit her with your new car on accident. And she died instantly. Why would you hit your own daughter?"

"I would never - "

"Be careful, Papa," she warned me, and as if she had been blown away like dust, she was gone. But the shadow still remained.

I have become much older, and I still drive these roads in search of the girl. Throughout the years, I have driven many cars. I have had trucks, vans, cars, and convertibles. I have rode on Jeeps with friends, carted camping supplies in SUVs, and picked up people in pick-ups. I have had two-seaters, three-seaters, and four-seaters, two-doors and sedans. I have pulled down the back seats to make room for other things. It does not matter. The silhouette follows me wherever I go, whatever I drive.

My wife finally passed two years ago, when the cancer came back in her lungs. Little tumorous tendrils suffocating her from the inside. We never adopted a child. Still, the silhouette remains. It becomes older like me. Perhaps it has white hair. And sometimes, I think I feel a stirring in my belly, hear a cry of a baby as if from miles away. I think of when I was a young lad, spry and lanky, and my first love. And how I broke up with her because I thought she was getting too fat.

This week's prompt was provided by Bones McGee.