End to End to End

A truck driver smokes unfiltered Camels in his cab, lighting one after the other, end to end to end. Drives with all the windows down. A starling shoots through his side window, filches the cigarette from his mouth, streaks on. It’s a little embarrassing that the trucker’s been flexing his biceps, imagining what he’d look like wearing a negligee. The starling blushes herself, thinking of his shame-tinted cheeks, which is how he feels most of the time—but especially now—his empty mouth, his hairy shoulders, his bird-altered consciousness. After all, who is he to question a bird cadging a cigarette?

* * *

The trucker stops at a Love’s Travel Stop. He orders a shower, buys his Monday Powerball ticket, thinks about the balled-up pillowcase full of kittens someone tossed in front of his tire a couple hours before, waits his turn.

Number 13, your shower’s ready.

He steps in the quarry-tiled cubicle and wonders if the droplets of fluid freckling the square tiles are really water, wonders what the droplets could be, what secret power or lethality or courageous secret they might possess. What world each drop holds. He peers closer into one of the hemispheres, searching for whatever snow-globe world lives there. Crannies his head upside down to see if the droplets filter any snowflakes down.

* * *

Hi, he says to the droplet, considering the woman at the till he had left counting out ten dollars in change for gas—It’s all I got, said the teenager—the woman who may also have been worrying about the disease and germs each quarter, nickel, dime, and penny were transporting. What if, in her distraction, she flipped a cleaning switch that changed the shower water to some kind of cleansing fluid, a mixture of Clorox and ammonia—or some other lethal combo. Or what if the droplets, one of them was something else, he didn’t know what, but something from the future no one even yet knew existed. He is trying to shake it off and thinking the starling thing might have been fluky.

* * *

But, just then, a bat flitters through the open door spilling into the shower, leaves behind a little guano, and lofts out the window into the night. And the trucker thinks of a time in third grade after winning the spelling bee, when Mrs. Mahoney held open a neon-green mesh delicates-in-the-dryer bag and let him, the spelling bee winner, pick from all the prizes—plastic Batman batwing rings, neon whirligigs, stringy pink-and-green-haired Troll dolls with keyrings around their necks, each keychain holding its figurine in what appeared to be a tragic chokehold.

* * *

And the trucker wishes that he had won every single spelling bee, not only in third grade but in all the fourth and fifth and sixth grades in all the world. And if he had won, he knows in that moment—staring at the droplets—that he would, for every spelling-bee victory, choose a Troll keychain, choose every cotton candy pink-haired Troll, every cotton candy blue-haired Troll, every Skittle-green-haired Troll, and save them from their chains. He’d take the keychains off and chain the rings together like the chains of layered bodies on the Playboy cover still in his dad’s third dresser drawer. No, he’d cover the world with a chain of bodies end to end to end. And he’d make the longest chain in the world—man on top of woman, woman on top of man, woman on top of woman, person on top of person. All loving each other—kitten on top of bat, bat on top of starling, droplet on top of ember, ember on top of man, and nothing, nothing burning, nothing dying—a chain so long and glittering it would someday glint under conservation glass in a museum, and the museum would be called The Museum of the History of How One Man Saved the Whole World.

SHELLY STEWART CATO

Shelly Stewart Cato holds an MFA from Sewanee School of Letters. She won the 2021 Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for Rattle’s 2020 Poetry Prize. Work is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Washington Square Review, New Ohio Review, and Harpur Palate. She is passionate about genre bending and short forms, blurring lines between truth and imagination.