Gas Cap
Registration
Says she’s from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Says that’s where she was coming from when I picked her up. Supposedly they named it after an old radio game show. I say they could’ve called it Jeopardy and saved everybody some time but she doesn’t laugh. I glance over at her every now and then. She’s pretty in a used-up sort of way. When I saw her on the side of the road I thought I’d fallen asleep. I ask her where she’s going again and she says you ever done ayahuasca and I shake my head and she says you want to. I say sure, why not, someday, and she says get ready for vomit and shit. Says once she tripped that she was her own mother giving birth to herself. She was in labor for forty-eight hours and remembers every second of it: the bed of ice they laid her on as they tried to bring her fever down, the surgical lights spinning like saucers as the blood flooded out of her. Being poked and prodded and pulled at by endless latexed hands. Says when she asked her mother about it the first thing she said was who told you about that? But nobody had. In the corner of my eye I can see she’s looking at me now like I’m supposed to say something but I’m not sure what so I sort of whistle. She pulls out a cellphone. The sun’s getting low. Someone I don’t care to mention tore the visors off my truck in August and I’m hoping I have a pair of shades in the glove compartment, but when I look all there is are some old Sonic napkins, a tire pressure gauge, the registration. I turn back to the road and she lunges for the wheel
Who is this?
It’s so quiet when it’s over—you can hear breathing on the line.
Ut Pictura Poesis
I don’t care what color the sky was.
Why did you look at me like that?
Noah Anthony Mezzacappa is a New York-based writer and filmmaker from Knoxville, Tennessee. He is the author of a chapbook, Count the Dark (Bottlecap Press, 2023), and his writing appears in New Feathers Anthology, San Pedro River Review, and WayWords, with forthcoming publications in HAD and Lullwater Review. You can find more of his work at www.noahmezzacappa.com and @noahmezzacappa.