NEW FICTION

(image c/o the independent)

There’s a photograph from the 1990s of a city salt truck turned onto its side in a snowy ditch. Those who were there will recall it from glossy posters and keychains and silkscreened t-shirts. It was a bumper sticker on the Ford Escorts of that generation’s first high school girlfriends, the ones who picked up mothers’ sons and returned home men of certain experiences.  

The popularity of the image came from its accidental perfection of storytelling: the history of the truck in tire skids; the driver’s panicked face as he leaned on the mound of salt gravity had evacuated from his vehicle. It spoke to our universal lack of control. The futility of man preserved in one lucky shot.  

It was an image powerful enough to drive my parents to divorce and put my father permanently out of work. He was thirty-six the night he turned over that truck, the same as I am now. He entered the ditch with his bloodstream meff’d on Alival, Tryptanol, and the thorny bloom of gas station Wild Irish Rose. Three decades on, my own bloodstream sometimes begs for similar potions.  

I’ve come to regard the photo as a kind of mandala—the ditch that represents the whole tight universe I’m destined to occupy. It’s a mnemonic to remind me just how badly the world can treat you. And because it’s been there to warn me, I’ve never been surprised—that I’m not as smart as I’d like, that I’m fatter than I was and thinner than I’ll be, that I’m under-employed, -sexed, and -appreciated. On and on.

There was a lack of fanfare when your mother left me, because I always assumed I’d end up alone. (And, in case you’re sentimental and believe it’s better to have loved and lost, I’ll remind you that when Tennyson wrote those words, he had a mortgage and health problems and was in desperate need of cash. He knew, as all desperate people do, that there’s no limit to the amount we’ll pay to pretend our second act will be better than our first. See, as evidence, those recent Frasier and Sex and the City reboots.)  

So, why am I telling you this? Because you’re my son, and you should hear it from me: time is a flat circle. It pains me to say, but gramp-gramp’s failures, and mine, will be your failures too. The die has already been cast and, I’m sorry to say, little dude, that die is loaded against you. Welcome to the ditch. 

That’s all I wanted to say. Okay, go on now. Have a good first day at school. Daddy loves you, kid.

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M.C. Schmidt‘s recent short fiction has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Southern Humanities Review, EVENT, Coolest American Stories 2024, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel, The Decadents (Library Tales Publishing, 2022) and the forthcoming short story collection, How to Steal a Train (Anxiety Press, 2025). He appeared previously at our main site, with the entertaining story, “We Love You, Ringo.”