Blue blows the cigarette smoke, bluely billowing out and scattering
against the windshield. The windshield streaked with water and
smudged with kamikaze bugs. The air around you colored wet and
gray and blue where the smoke hangs in slow-motion haze. Sluicing
a careful 55 MPH through another puddled interstate, both hands
on the wheel, like you were taught. It's getting dark. 95.5 Springfield
KTOZ is playing meditative music, lonesome-slow, sparse and abstract
sounding. The smoke billows and then disperses and then just sits
and swirls and smells of ashes and stale coffee and clammy rain
water. You can smell a storm brewing, and you can smell a storm
fading, trailing leaden clouds and dragging lightning across the
mountains, but in the midst of the storm the only thing you can
smell is smoke.
According to Lewis Carroll, the perfect map would be the exact
same size as the country it was meant to represent.
