The Driver's Side Window

Out of the feral blue yon a cusp of sky so blue it seems impossible. Impossible things are possible when the mind removes itself from the appearance of things: a blue sky becomes a blue sky that defies description, and if it did, would seem meaningless and unimaginable. The harridan cambered her legs into a curlicue, knees bowed in at the meniscus, ankles touching, cartilage torn into lettuce yarn. She sat like this to encourage the blood to circulate in her legs and to discourage stiffness and rickets, which was an ongoing concern and none too irritating, even for a harridan. Her mother, long dead and rotting in some cesspit, the whereabouts of which she’d long forgotten, told her that were she to twirl and bend her legs into inhumane knots she’d end up with camber-legs and stretched ligaments, or buck-kneed and short on brains. This was reason enough to sit with her thighs abutting her hipbone, pelvis turned inwards and a smidgeon to the left, scheming up ways to further defy a mother she never cared much for, even a dead one. She remembered the day her father bought a new car, a shiny green Falcon with a turning-knob on the steering wheel, and the look on her mother’s face when he pulled into the laneway, her apron cassocked over her shoulder, a sternness that made her look more manly than womanly. She chastised and harangued him, then refused to allow the beastly motorcar in the laneway, or him for that matter, to which he responded by gravelling the car over the front lawn, his finger extended above the chrome of the driver’s side window. The harridan felt that she was doing her part to ensure that her father’s protestations, as small and ineffective as they were, were kept alive: his finger well above the chrome of the driver’s side window.