Innerstate

When it’s quiet at night, Rae can hear the slow chug of the freight train all the way up in the hills – it follows a tight line parallel to the interstate on its way south or maybe north. From her still bedroom, the sound of movement moves her: far-off transit in transit as if she needs the reminder that what’s here one minute will be gone the next: small bundles, packages, precious cargo pass through only to move on & then on.

The graffiti-marked containers glow in the night, bright with someone else’s art. Time & everything else pauses 

until the burst of a gunshot

or firecracker 

breaks the barrier – then it’s a jolt in her heart, the pace of okay okay as if to breathe is to bring her daughter home from late Saturday night plans out there, near or not, the gun that blasts. 

12 a.m. her daughter texts leaving now & Rae pictures her passing over the tracks, merging onto 880 with the semi-trucks, taking the exit for 580 or 24 or 13 depending on the way she decides to drive. Or cutting through the city on the side streets: past the glowing liquor store up a block from the dark elementary school, the blinking broken light at International, onto MacArthur, then Fruitvale & finally home. 

When the garage door opens, closes, Rae knows Mona will come up to punch in the alarm code & poke her head in the room. You’re still up? Mona will ask even though she knows why – the worry carved like a familiar route they travel by memory: well-worn tracks up & down the coast of a childhood disrupted by violence. Rae wants to hold her in place now that they are both safe but the years speed by like exits on the interstate. Six, twelve, eighteen. The future a far-off billboard getting closer & closer. 

“Did you have fun?” Rae asks. 

Mona, in the doorway. Mona with her car keys swinging. Yawns.

“Yeah.”

Rae with her night-sweats. Rae with her fears. 

“Glad you’re home.”

“You don’t have to wait up.”

“I know.” 

In the morning, the sun reminds Rae to breathe. There is the magnolia out the window; there is the lemon tree, full of fruit. There is the cat, asking for breakfast & Mona, too. A need Rae wears like a sleeve – to see her daughter pouring cereal in the kitchen, to hear her belting Glee songs in the shower. Still Rae knows how it goes: she’s grown.

Lisa Piazza is a writer, educator and mother from Oakland, Ca. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. 

A Song for Lisa