Mather Schneider

School let out for the summer. Aaron and I still had to wait until we turned 16 to get our official driver’s licenses and until then we were only supposed to operate a motor vehicle when accompanied by an adult. We were still stuck on our bicycles. We went a little farther each day, killing time, staying away from home. We were riding on the gravel road through Jenson’s Bottoms and we came to an old broken-down wooden house surrounded by junk.

She lives at 389 W. Rillito Drive and is seven feet tall. She doubles over to get in my cab, her face a sad skull with cracked hide stretched over it, bony hands like giant spiders, knees that knock the dash, a smile like an unknown species. I begin the drive to Arivaca, a tiny town two hours south, way out in the desert, where UFOs are seen each night, where time seems to stop, where there are javelinas as big as cows with tusks like saber-tooth tigers.

LIGHT Fluorescent light despot of classrooms and hospitals greenish penciler of eyebags and inner hells. Blacklight conjurer of scorpions in midnight woodpiles voyeur of semen and old blood on motel sheets. Sunlight at dawn like a fox with ice on its muzzle at noon when shadows disappear and evening shoulders a moth-eaten shawl. Strobe light a teenager’s dope dream amateur filmmaker’s best friend an epileptic fit in a strip club. Camp fire light like first love or last hope plum in the cheeks the popping of the bones of an old ballerina her loins still hot.