BluestoneReview

Interstates By Marguerite Floyd

Soon, my father told me, you’ll be able to go anywhere on the new interstates. Chicago in hours instead of days. He pointed out how standardized exit ramps would work, and explained spaghetti junctions. It was the late fifties, the world still awash with possibilities. A full moon hesitated on the horizon, huge and yellow. We were in his red pickup truck on a state road, and his hand swept across the dashboard, as if showing me the way to my future without him. My elementary teachers threatened to fail me if he took me out of school one more day to go traveling through the state on the old roads, talking politics to farmers beside tall crops of green tobacco while I measured the white stripes shimmering on the road with my small sandaled feet, heel to toe, astonished at how long the stripes were, up close. He bought land right off interstates newly laid, sure we’d make our for - tune with gas stations and truck stop leases. Always anywhere but where we were. When the madness began decades later he lived in a city entangled with interstates, overtaken with wasted promise and beliefs betrayed, neon lights flickering like one more lie.

I was gone by then, estranged and without hope. When he died I buried him next to his father in southern Kentucky, closest to the nearest interstate. Later, I took the old roads back home, dangerous with their unbanked curves and sheer edges.

The interstates are everywhere now, just as he had said, and as familiar to me as the memory of the long white stripes I once measured heel to toe. And I go everywhere.

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