The highway was slick and iridescent, bleeding red from brake lights scattered on either side of our car. Mac had hit something small, a raccoon or maybe a possum. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my head. But when a voice shot out of our radio—a voice that sounded like a jumble of sentient vibrations—I winked one eye open in case a claw pushed through our janky AM radio and grabbed Mac by the throat.
“Hello? Anybody there?” Mac asked.
A muffled echo on the other side of the air waves mumbled a reply, which Mac treated like a friendly greeting.
“Could be some trucker on a CB radio,” I suggested.
“Going north?” Mac asked.
The response was a staccato of static and dead space before one of our fan belts drowned out all other sound with whirs and thudding.
Mac balled up his right fist and pounded the dashboard.
“Goddamn’t I told you to get that fixed, didn’t I?”
I stared out the window and drew imaginary lines between droplets and runnels. Mac’s question was for me.
The last twenty miles had felt like a painful endurance test: the murderous thump, the squeak of the wipers, scattered riffs of dance music by artists we were too old to recognize. Flood season had come early. Rain beat against the windshield, leaving a wet curtain the wipers try in vain to beat away.
By the time Mac killed something small and nocturnal, we were two hours away from his parents’ house and his brother’s house and a river that left most of the backyards and driveways ankle-deep in water. Mac wanted to move back home. He spent our first hour on the road telling me why we needed to live near family—which meant his family. I spent the last forty minutes telling him why I didn’t want to buy a two-flat with his fifty-something uncle who smelled like weed but knew how to “fix things.” After our last stop for gas about twenty miles ago, we’d settled into stubborn silence. Then a stranger crackled through the air waves.
“Hello? Hello?” The voice on the other side of the radio was clear, curious, feminine.
“Holy crap! You can hear me?” Mac slapped the steering wheel and scooted higher in his seat the way he did whenever he got to the good part in a story.
“Yes,” she answered. She sounded impatient.
Mac wiggled his eyebrows and grinned at me like we were in cahoots, like hearing some stranger acknowledge us over a car radio on a rainy stretch of highway was some big victory. I uncrossed my arms.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
The reply was a distorted collection of syllables.
Mac shouted the question a second time. I fiddled with the radio, but he pushed my hand away and adjusted the knobs himself.
“Help…Help.”
“Help? Do you need help?” Mac shouted.
“Maybe she thinks we need help,” I offered. Mac shushed me and fiddled with the knobs again.
“How can we help?” By then Mac had resorted to a kind of slow yelling like he was translating his thoughts for someone who was hard of hearing.
The response was a crackle that could’ve been sailboat or salesman. Mac persisted, determined to let this faceless, disembodied stranger know we were there to provide whatever assistance she required. I pressed my eyes closed. The darkness only magnified the hiss of the radio static and the sound of the rain pounding the windshield and the roof.
My eyes opened in time to see a vanload of college kids speed past us fast enough to hydroplane. Their tires spit an angry torrent of water across the driver’s side of the Camry. Mac swore at them before apologizing to the voice from the radio. She repeated a word that sounded like a question—who? through?—while I watched the van fishtail across the road, narrowly missing a Cadillac and a truck hauling gasoline. I mourned all the creatures they must’ve crushed beneath their wheels that night. Mac wouldn’t stop talking. He clutched the steering wheel with both hands and went on about the rain and the flood and the long drive home from St. Charles. His cheeks were frozen in the perma-grin he plastered across his face for family get-togethers and work events. He complained about gas prices and loneliness and settling.
“I think we missed our last turn,” he said.
“Yes,” she answered.
Mac told her about the car he wanted and the house he planned to buy two hundred miles away from the house we already owned. I wanted to talk to the voice too, but there was no room. I wanted to tell her that Mac is the kind of man who eats out of boxes and cans instead of dinner plates and serving bowls. That Mac sits in the same chair every Sunday; that he doesn’t look at me when I walk in a room. That he only says my name when he needs something, and he drags out the second syllable for too long.
“Help is on the way,” the voice said, only this time she spoke with robotic clarity.
The steering locked. Mac was hairy elbows, clawing fingers, a string of strangled profanities. Our car skidded off the road, and we flipped over into a sloppy ravine. The chassis cracked with painful violence.
“Hello?” I ask. Between the angry hum of the busted windshield wipers, the car draws in tiny, ragged breaths. A fresh pressure throbs through the narrow folds in my brain. I want to reach over and feel his face with my fingers, but I can’t move. My chest and neck are a shimmering mosaic of shattered glass.
“Mac?” I whisper. His reply is a garbled groan, and I know it’s too late. I know that whichever way we turn, we won’t see what’s headed our direction until it runs us over and leaves us both broken and grieving.
Martha (Marty) Keller’s short stories have appeared in Cagibi, Midway Journal, Roanoke Review, Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and elsewhere. She is also a reader for Flash Fiction Magazine. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best Short Fiction anthologies. Over the years, she’s worked in strip malls, skyscrapers, and high school classrooms. She lives with her family at the end of a long trail somewhere outside of Chicago.
Lost Balloon 