19 Ways of Crossing the Street After the Old Guy In the Sedan Jerks to a Last-Minute Stop in the Vons Parking Lot Crosswalk and Motions for You to Pick Up the Pace, Can’t You See He Didn’t Want to Stop For You in the First Place, Lady?
Imagining a possible legitimate reason for his impatience
by Halina Duraj
- Slowly. So, so slowly.
- Slowly, middle fingers extended.
- Slowly, in a chiffon tutu, leaping and pirouetting.
- Pouncing onto his hood in a Catwoman suit, then sitting cross-legged and eating an ice cream cone, your back to the windshield.
- Number four, facing the windshield.
- Slowly, stopping halfway, and sticking out your tongue, wild-eyed, like Albert Einstein in that famous photo.
- Belly laughing. This guy!
- Skipping. Quickly, then slowly.
- On a pogo stick. Remember pogo sticks?!
- With a hula hoop.
- Belly dancing. No. He might enjoy that.
- With a gaggle of clowns running around and around the car, then crawling in and out of the windows, over his lap, out, around and around. Forever.
- With a “Thriller” flash mob.
- With Thich Nat Hanh, in his plum and saffron robes, both of you mindful of the camber of the asphalt against the soles of your feet, breathing in gratitude with each measured step, breathing out gratitude with each measured step.
- Imagining a possible legitimate reason for his impatience: his adult daughter is dying of cancer in a nearby hospice; she has asked for a few sips of her favorite soda, root beer; the hospice kitchen doesn’t have any so he has rushed to Vons and has been rude to everyone, shouldering shoppers out of his way in the aisles, snapping at the cashier-in-training, ripping the two-liter bottle out of her hand when she asks if he’d like a bag, shoving other shoppers aside at the sliding glass doors, as you once saw Craig T. Nelson do in an after-school special about a girl dying of leukemia, or maybe cystic fibrosis.
- Wearing fairy wings and twirling crepe streamers in a pagan solstice ritual.
- Levitating with a jet-pack. Deploying it just enough to float evenly over the ground, six inches up, like that illusionist, David Blaine, though he does it without a jet pack, as far as you know.
- Bemoaning that you won’t think of any of these ways until the fuming drive home, when you’ll comfort yourself with this: You know what to do. You take what enrages you and turn it into language, right here, right now. And that is joyful. So, on some level, you owe this joy to that which enrages you, which, you suppose, is him.
- Slowly, with begrudging gratitude—you might make something of him yet.
Halina Duraj’s work has appeared in Ecotone, The Sun, The Harvard Review, Fiction, Witness, and other journals. Her flash fiction has appeared in Cream City Review, Bear Review, and is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel. Her story collection, The Family Cannon, was released by Augury Books in 2014. She teaches at the University of San Diego.
