I just can’t get past the grease-blacked hands. Be nice if I could, though – be one of the family men. My dad and brother, both holding their bologna-on-white-breads with those same blacked hands. Mine throbbing, jammed deep into the cherry-red ’66 Mustang’s ribcage, feeling for something I don’t know how to feel for.
Their minds turn the same gears – cam shafts and spark plugs. Mine on the music: Lennon (the “soft” stuff) and Hetfield (the “loud” stuff). I ask, again, what it is I’m trying to fix, and in one sentence: “You’ll know it when you find it,” My dad drains the little confidence I had left. I toss a plea to my brother, but my dad seals our communication: “Let him figure it out on his own, Bryan.”
Face pressed against the air filter, fishing for the wrench I dropped into its aluminum alloy muscles. I can hear his eyes rolling. My pounding heart echoes his tapping foot.
My fingers catch on a bolt, shaving a layer of skin off my knuckle. “I think I found it!” My dad’s reply, skeptical, rather than pleased: “Do you think you found it, or did you find it?” Turning the wrench, black fluid pools around my feet in rainbows, bright as my tie-dyed shirt. “I knew he’d screw it up. Go fix it, Bryan.” As my brother shifts in to salvage things, I slip out, sealing their relationship.
Chris Davis earned the title of “least prepared person to ever enter space” by NASA, farmed exotic guinea pigs in Peru, and was once bit by a goat. His interests include above-ground spelunking and writing fake bios. He recently graduated the fourth grade and owns over seven houseplants."
