I pushed the clutch in and pulled the gear shift back. The headlights burned like a lantern in the dark. All the windows were down. The corporation limit sign, stuck in into the sloping ditch, passed by her open window on the right. It's reflective surface smiling at us like a salesman's teeth, waving goodbye as we left town and moved into the open night.
The dark dormers and sleepy sophets of the faceless houses sitting in culde-sacs eventually gave away to low and calm corn fields. The stalks stood in rows like regimental soldiers. They stood like silent sentries over the flat warm dirt, too obedient to even shift their weight in the still night. Their vascular systems perspired and evaporated into the cooler darkness above where the fireflies snapped like static. Their silent lights floated like sparks falling from an axe man's grinding wheel; sharpening his steel edge alone in the night.
The air blew fast but soft through the windows. It billowed and wispered. It carried the smell of cellulose and sugar from the hay cut and lying still and flat in fields. It carried the seconds and the minutes that make up June; the instances that make up our lives. It carried the quiet mass that lies for miles above our bodies and presses us to the ground. It carried the burdens of remembrance, the vapor of gravity and of flora, the pollen of agriculture, and it filled the space of a home not bound by walls or even fences. It fed the blood of our hearts, seeping deep into the smallest of capillaries of our bodies.
I look to the passenger's seat, the side of her face was glowing in the pale light from the dashboard instruments. She was smiling comfortably and quietly. Her arm too was resting on the edge of the car door's open window seal.
I let my foot off of the clutch and leaned my other on the gas. The flywheel grabbed ahold, and we accelerated into the country, my shoulders pressed into the back of my seat. The torque of the motor flexed in it's mounts like a boxer clenching his fist. I had driven over the smooth and patient asphalt a thousand times. I have let my arm drop out of the window and let my fingers unfold and hang into the wind nearly as many. It was only this time - for reasons perhaps only found in the cosmos beyond or in the cytoplasm within - that I saw the moment for what it was. I saw it not as a memory nor as an expectation, not past tense nor future tense. I felt it like that moment of weightlessness between footsteps, between the moving of hands on clock, the moment of stillness between beats of the heart - like the moment of silent idleness between shifting gears as I drive towards home.
My sister sat beside me and said nothing. I agreed with her. In her own way, she was feeling the same. The moment blew through my open hand and between my fingers, then vanished into the dark behind us.