PONSETT
paul silverman
They were driving to their long-planned weekend at Ponsett, Sam’s ocean place. The weather forecasts had turned pessimistic and the blue sky was now the thick white of milk gone sour. Laura, not Sam, was at the wheel. Sam seemed incapable of steering himself, let alone a car. He spent most of the trip staring into a Kleenex, on emergency lookout for blood, which he saw as a lethal threat. He’d mentioned that his father had died from some kind of cancer above the neck; and that he always remembered the blood seeping out, just flowing from his father's nose and draining into the old man's saliva. As they drove in silence she watched him in the passenger seat, fixated over a wad of tissue, spitting and looking, spitting and looking – and he spat so hard he finally produced a smear of blood. She imagined him as the future father of her child, doing this in the stall of some hospital men's room on delivery day. The thought made her cold all over and she began to stare over at him the way he was staring at the Kleenex, so fixated at fifty miles an hour she saw nothing like a tree, only a white flash that perhaps was lightning.
Paul Silverman
www.paulsilverman.com
Wiggle Room
David Foster Wallace