The Interstate

These days I drive the I-390 past trees just splotched with red. For three years I lived in a country without autumn, where nothing ever died, and now even the grasses in the verge turn yellow, tall stalks proud that they’re on their way out. I’m on my way out, too, as I travel down the slow road. 

Sixty-five gets the best gas mileage, sometimes sixty, and everyone passes me as the sun makes the car a transparent bowl that carries me past long fields of razed wheat, hot and golden-armed. These fields have turned to graveyards, a young man this morning caught in the jaws of a baler. I can see the bow of his mother’s back as she bends over his head. I’m dying a different kind of death, the death that happens when youth rushes into your body, far into its silent center, where you feel it quicken in cell divisions, but it’s not yours. 

Every day, the clouds roll off to the edge of the fields and disappear. The sky opens into a clear basket of sun upended over these farms and woods, so bright I squint to see the road. I began to die the day my firstborn stared with weird, blind love at the patterns of light that crackled across her eyes the way a pool’s surface throws shadows over its white floor. She looked past me to the place where she’d come from, a place that looked like the koi pond I leaned over one summer as a teenager, the water tangled with vines where fish glided too far down to be seen as anything but slow movements illuminated from below. I loved a boy then, his hair a lion’s ruff around his head, his movements so quick he disappeared into the trees. 

Some parts of us die before the others. The wind whips the car with the force of a comet’s tail. The gust flattens the fields, dust dashes against the windshield, glitters up and away. It sends shivers through my spine, my body bent on a point inside that expands faster than fireflies loosed through the mouth of a glass bottle. I have seen my firstborn run away, laughing. Part of me will stretch outside myself, spreading with my daughters over places I’ll never see. Part of me will stay here, tired and small, as the world dies around me in fresh, clear breaths. 

JR Fenn is a writer from the Central Appalachians. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in many places, including Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Diagram, Split Lip Magazine, the Bath Flash Fiction anthology series, and the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology series. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University, where she won the Joyce Carol Oates Award in Fiction, and her writing has been supported by fellowships from Orion, Writing by Writers, and the Key West Literary Seminar, along with funded residencies at Hewnoaks and the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, among others. Her chapbook, Tiny Vessels, won The Masters Review Chapbook Open and will be published by Red Mare Press in February 2026. She teaches at State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and lives in Western New York with her family. More at jrfenn.com.

This essay first appeared in Stone Canoe, issue 10 (January 2016).