Jason M. Jones

As I mentioned in December, I did a reading for WXPN for Live from the Kelly Writers House. The reading was from my novel-in-progress Personal Time. A month ago, I posted the excerpt I didn’t use. They have now posted the reading online, so if you’d like to give it a listen, you can click on this link and read along below:

You grab your car keys off the hook in the kitchen and head out back. You open the garage and pull your car toward the street. Oak Road bisects Springhouse at the edge of your driveway and pulling out is precarious business. You check the street to your right and left and glance at Oak in the rearview mirror. There’s a stop sign at the end that few drivers observe, so you can’t assume cars coming from that direction will wait and let you go. Rather, you pause until the street clears and pull out when no one’s coming. You resent the amount of concentration this takes. But then, you’ve never enjoyed driving. You hate cars and traffic and everything that goes along with it, and this is why you didn’t get your license until you were twenty-eight and your then-girlfriend, now-wife issued an ultimatum: “I won’t marry you unless you learn to drive.”

It’s something you’ve long attributed to your biological father, this hatred of driving; though attributing any neurosis to a parent after you’ve become an adult strikes you as juvenile, adolescent. Unless, of course, that parent was abusive, which none of yours had been. Your father had simply been reckless. He’d liked to speed and tailgate, and he shouted at other drivers when he thought they’d done something stupid like cutting him off or going too slow. This seems an attribute common to most drivers, you suppose, for only a handful of the people you’ve known can keep their cool in the midst of being cut off. But your father’s anger and rage had affected you deeply. They’d instilled a fear of the road from your youth, and you worry you’ve inherited some of these impulses and might be passing them on to your daughter.

Before your daughter was born, you’d been a shouter. Someone inches into your lane, and you’re quick to call out and curse. But you’ve tried to stifle this impulse whenever she’s in the car. You grumble and mutter at worst and grind your teeth, and sometimes you catch yourself mid-admonishment, “What in the world do you think you’re..?!” But you’re not always in control, and you’re worried she’ll pick this up from you, this yelling and screaming when you should be calm. She doesn’t understand all your words yet, but she gets your tone. And if at all possible, you’d like to avoid her thinking that driving is a constant state of battle—attack and evasion. Though there is some truth in this. A large part of driving has to do with being alert, avoiding other people’s mistakes. And even if you are alert and manage to avoid the other drivers’ errors, there are still eventualities you can’t plan for.

Just the past weekend, they’d been driving home from the grocery store when two deer had leapt a fence in someone’s yard and darted into the street. An oncoming car the next lane over had tried to avoid them, but as it swerved, it hit one of the deer head-on. Both the deer’s body and the hood of the car had crumpled on impact, and the deer fell back to the road, ravaged. You were in the passenger seat. Your wife was driving. And the sight of this creature, so strong and majestic, having jumped a six foot fence just moments before only to lie dead in the road an instant later, had rattled you. Your body drained of strength. You slumped against the seat and reached back and took your daughter’s hand. She hadn’t seen it, and you were thankful. She just wrapped her tiny fingers around the edge of your palm, and you were comforted. You weren’t sure what you’d have done if it was your car that hit the deer. You would have been distraught, both at the creature’s death and the damage it had done to your hood; though it seemed callous to worry about damage after you’d killed such a beautiful creature.

Here you were, you hadn’t hit it, it hadn’t been your fault, and still, you mourned. You don’t like to think of death anymore than you have to, not because you’re trying to avoid the reality that someday it will happen to you, but because you’re all too well aware it will. You know that it’ll happen to you and to everyone you love and everyone you don’t love and you didn’t need to be reminded of that on a trip to the grocery store. Sometimes at night, you wake, thinking of this, and you reach for your wife to make sure she’s there, and you crack your daughter’s bedroom door to check on her, and when you feel your wife’s form and hear your daughter breathing, you’re relieved. And yet, knowing that they’re alive brings with it the inverse knowledge that it won’t always be so. And if they survive you—which you hope is the case, since you wouldn’t be able to deal with losing them—there’s still the harsh truth that for them you’ll be gone and they’ll feel your absence just as deeply.

When you’d reached home and got out of the car, your legs were shaking and you felt sick to your stomach. You took your daughter out of her car seat and walked into the house and said to your wife, “I need to lay down for a minute.” You sat on the sofa and leaned back into the pillows and put an arm over your eyes. You didn’t need long. Just a few minutes to process what you’d seen. What you felt then must have been mild shock. But any death that occurred in close proximity to you and your family, even that of a deer, required time to reflect, to steady yourself. There had been a wet thud as the deer’s body folded. Its hind legs bent back and buckled and it had collapsed, but the worst part of what you’d seen was how its torso still rose and fell with its last few breaths.

You wondered if the second deer, the one who’d made it off the road and darted into the bushes on the other side, would mourn. Did it understand what had happened? You’ve heard it said that humans are the only creatures aware of their own mortality, that this is our curse, this awareness of death. But if the other deer, the living one, went on without its companion, how could it not have known what happened? Were the two mother and daughter? What was the social order among their kind—packs, families? You have no idea. They were either two does, or a doe and its fawn, for neither had antlers. And you can’t help thinking of that too—the antlers. What would happen if you hit a buck, its antlers angling toward you through the windshield? Would they pierce the glass? Go through your chest? The incident had happened so quickly that even if you scanned the street closely, you couldn’t have predicted this would happen. The fence was right next to the road, and they’d been hidden behind it. One leap. Those creatures were so fast and so strong that you wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to avoid them either. You would have been riled. You get riled so easily when you drive.