RSVP

Perry drummed the steering wheel with the side of his thumb, staring ahead at the wedge of illumined asphalt, the trunks of Fir that flitted by on either side and the farther darkness where the headlights didn’t reach. The only sound was the car heater and  wind against the car windows.
+++++Alice turned off the heater, fanning herself for effect. The movement of her hand drew Perry’s eye to the electric blue of the digital clock, reading well over an hour since she had given him a look from across his parents’ coffee table; their signal to leave. She held a lasagna covered in saran wrap across her legs and he noticed the way the knuckle of her thumb curled over the glass handle. He pressed the tips of his fore finger and thumb to the corners of his eye.
+++++“I’m sorry, Hon. They’re my parents.”
+++++“It’s fine. I just don’t know what to say when they start.”
+++++“I know. I know.”
+++++“It’s the last time we’ll see them before the wedding, you know?”
+++++“Yes, I know.”
+++++“Always so hard. Always a fight with them. I don’t know why it always has to be a fight with them.”
+++++Perry pulled his lips over his teeth, nodding sagely. He squeezed her knee but the dish put his arm at a funny angle so he withdrew. The trees flitted past and the quietness suggested deep woods on all sides. He put his hand to his eyes again and cleared his throat in preparation to hazard some other conciliatory gesture when the car vibrated from an impact, tires skidding. An image lit up in the white sheen of  headlights, in perfect stillness against the blurred motion of the asphalt, the trees and the undergrowth that registered only a soft line of indiscriminate color. The sound of the sickening pliability of the car hood and the object climbing heavily over the roof, undoubtedly man-shaped, provided almost instant retrospection of the moment. Perry didn’t stop driving but the shape of the object had definitely been that of a man.
+++++“Are you okay? Are you okay?”
+++++“I’m okay. Are you okay?”
+++++“I’m okay. Are you sure you’re okay?”
+++++“I’m sure if you’re sure.”
+++++The car’s stereo was turned on at full volume in the impact and the speakers blared the French language learning CD Alice had bought for their Parisian honeymoon.
+++++“We should stop. Don’t you think we should stop?”
+++++“I don’t know.”
+++++“I think we should definitely probably stop.”
+++++“I. je. je.”
+++++“But there’s nowhere to stop here. There’s no shoulder.”
+++++“We should really stop.”
+++++“There’s a gas station a mile up. We can stop there. Call the police.”
+++++“You, singular. tu. tu.”
+++++“Jesus. Oh my God.”
+++++“It’s okay, Honey. It’ll be okay.”
+++++“He. il. il.”
+++++The CD player skipped ahead again, distorting the even-tempered voices of the language coaches into mechanistic gobbledygook. The stereo stopped on lesson four, “Saying and Replying to ‘How Are You?’”
+++++“What about the wedding, Perry? It’s in three days.”
+++++“Can we really worry about that?”
+++++“I don’t know. Perry, I don’t want to go to jail.”
+++++“No one’s going to jail. If anyone’s going to jail, I’m going to jail, because I’m the one driving. No one’s going to jail.”
+++++“How are you, informal? Comment etes-vous? Comment etes-vous?”
+++++“Shit. We’ve got to stop.”
+++++“But the gas station. Let’s go to the gas station, then decide what to do.”
+++++“You mean stop at the gas station and then call. Right?”
+++++“How are you, formal? Comment allez-vous? Comment allez-vous?”
+++++He turned his head as they passed a streetlight, an image broke over him like a wave, an image of Alice in thick clumps of running redness and he said, “Oh, Jesus!” before he remembered.
+++++“Honey, watch out! The road!”
+++++He had swerved over so the double yellow line bisected the center of the hood, signaling its crumpled asymmetry.
+++++“How’s it going, informal? Ca va? Ca va?”
+++++“Jesus, I thought all that sauce was blood.”
+++++She looked down and started as if just noticing how the lasagna had painted her entire body bloody.
+++++“Oh, God.”
+++++She mopped the front of her shirt with cupped fingers.
+++++“Can you turn that thing off?” she said. She pointed to the CD player. He tried punching the button—“It’s going well. Ca va bien. Ca va bien.”—but the player only skipped ahead and then back again. She reached into the back seat for a beach towel to clean off the lasagna sauce.
+++++“Comment appelez-vous? Comment appelez-vous?”
+++++“Jesus. I thought you were all bloody.” His voice cracked.
+++++“I’m fine. But we should stop, don’t you think?”
+++++“Whatever you want.”
+++++“We should definitely stop.”
+++++“I’m just glad you’re okay.”
+++++“We have to stop.”
+++++“Please repeat. Répéter, s’il vous plaît. Répéter, s’il vous plaît..”
+++++The sign reading Gas Station in red letters against white plastic rose into view over the trees on a tall metal post. The road widened into a shoulder and the squat brick buildings and the two gas pumps appeared under the lights. Perry pulled into a parking spot near the compressed air tank.
+++++“You got your cell phone?”
+++++“Yeah. Should we call your parents first?”
+++++“What? No. No, they’d just talk us out of it or call their lawyer or something.”
+++++He unlatched and pushed open the door, dialing 9-1-1. He leaned his forearms over the hood of the car with the phone to his face and released air through his teeth. He looked at the moths circling the single bulb over the compressed air tank, spiraling into and out of darkness. He heard the phone ring and then a voice but he didn’t answer. He saw something caught under the rubber stripping of the luggage rack and walked around the front of the car, Alice peering through the cracked windshield at him, the phone still to his ear and the voice’s question repeating unanswered in his ear. He lowered the phone and pressed the red button. A deer foot with black nails and broken off bone showing whiter in the irregular fissure and sticking a half-inch over the torn, matted fur. It took some pulling to get off.
+++++He held the foot up to the glass of the passenger-side window, knocked and heard a muffled shriek, then the strained mechanical whine of the window lowering.
+++++“What is that?”
+++++“Deer foot.”
+++++She looked up at him and he nodded.
+++++“Je ne parle pas très bien Francais. Je ne parle pas très bien Francais.”
+++++Driving home, he had to steer with only his left hand because she wouldn’t let go of the other.
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Nathan Pensky is a recent graduate of the Creative Writing M.F.A. program at Mills College and has been published, or has work forthcoming, in such periodicals as McSweeney’s, Defenestration, Yankee Pot Roast, MONKEYBICYCLE, The Foghorn, and Journal of Truth and Consequence. He is an Associate Flash Fiction/Fiction Editor for the online literary journal JMWW, and a blogger for the pop culture website PopMatters