Sweet Home Alabama
The windows were rolled down, the air sticky, humid, smelling of grass and jasmine, manure and magnolia blossoms. The road was empty, cracked, pocked like a moonscape. I’d taken the backroads home. It was longer, for sure, but more scenic. Quieter. It’d been more than a decade since my last visit, and I needed to get accustomed to this place again. To the pace again.
I hadn’t been paying much attention to my driving. No point, really. The road was fairly straight, and I was the only one on it. My mistake. The deer probably saw me coming; I hadn’t seen it. My tires skidded for some twenty feet, loudly, the sound stabbing at the silence. I missed the deer. The water oak wasn’t so lucky. Neither was my car, for that matter. The Beemer was barely ten months old.
“f**k,” I
