The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Wreckage

With love, there is always a starting line. That stab-in-the-gut moment before you know how far you will actually go – how much speed you can really take.

I imagined entering that moment behind the wheel of a sleek and shiny vehicle. Instead, my ride rolled up looking like your parents’ sedan. Square and neat, painted in a careful beige. But to my surprise, behind the doors were leather seats, custom floor mats, and a light system designed to weave and bob around the dashboard like a marquee. I had no business looking beneath the hood at inner workings I did not understand, but I did it anyway.

Did you know that behind your back people jokingly called you Benjamin Button? I think it was because you took an old-fashioned approach to youth. You were the only man under fifty to unironically wear cardigans over starched shirts and keep a standing appointment with a barber. Liberal and clean, you were Oklahoma’s version of a young Kennedy.

Our first encounter was at a university sponsored event featuring a documentary about North Korea. There was heat between us the instant we sat side by side. Full disclosure, I was not attracted to the outward you, but like a kid who must touch broken glass even knowing they’ll be cut, touch you I did. Turns out, I was fascinated by rough edges.

Our relationship was confusing at the start, like when you learn to drive a stick shift. You advocated equality for everyone but used the one gas station in town still offering full service. I told you it was elitist and lazy to have someone pump your gas for you. Later, with clean fingers, you claimed you were doing me a favor by keeping your hands chemical free. I’d forgotten the argument by then.

After a few months of dating, we were firmly stuck somewhere between love and lust – Lost, I know to call it now. It didn’t feel like a muddy middle then. There was a certain comfort in not knowing if, or how, it all might end.

Can you remember the afternoon I came home from class to find you in my apartment? You were sitting in the only chair without bad springs reading a newspaper and drinking a cocktail like a man on a Nick at Nite rerun.

“Hi honey, you’re home,” you said, and I laughed the kind of laugh that comes from finding something funny.

I’d read the room incorrectly though. You’d prepared a real meal, had a cocktail waiting for me. This wasn’t you being ironic. This was you imagining I was ready for prime time.

When you touched me later, I worried the residue of newspaper ink on your fingers might somehow mark me.

“We should do this more often,” you said, after. I hoped you just meant the sex.

Weeks later, after an early dinner at a chain restaurant, we slowly wound our way back home. You loved taking meandering drives through this town you’d been born into and oddly, this was when I found you the sexiest. I watched you drive in the darkening evening like a stranger. You smoked, fingernails perfectly clipped, straddling the cigarette like a royal. Windows down, inhaling deeply, you were a man shrouded in secrets.

The smoke left the window like a sinister premonition.

John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels” came on the radio. You turned the volume up with your index finger, then dropped your hand, stopping suddenly to stroke the inside of my leg.

I was wondering how I could schedule our meetings for after dark only, when a streak of light erupted in my right eye. I thought a jogger had run in front of the car. It took a second more for the sound of scraping steel to reach my ears.

Then, the bump.

We had run over something round and hard.

We looked at each other. The song, the smoke, the sense of surety gone.

As the pieces came together, we looked away. A motorcycle had run the stop sign, perhaps seen our car too late, stopped too suddenly, and the driver had fallen with the bike. Our car, this car, your car, had run over the helmet of the rider.

Nothing would ever be the same after this, I thought.

We turned back to each other looking for clues as if we were maps. One of us had to get out of the car, but who?

Lights came on in houses near the intersection of the accident. Voices followed slamming doors. I still remember. Your hands coming off the steering wheel. Your nod, not at me, but at some urging I could not hear. When you opened the car door, I opened mine too.

On the road, surprisingly, the motorcycle rider was sitting up. People arrived yelling for others nearby to dial 911. I walked away from the car and saw the lonely helmet across the road. When we ran it over, it must have been at the exact right position to push the rider out of the helmet like a cork released from champagne.

Suddenly there was so much noise. Sirens and voices. Metal being moved.

After our statement to the police, we were free to go. The motorcycle rider was fine. We were fine. Nothing was going to change after all.

For months we fed off the story of the accident. After a few tells, we added details about the light on our right and learned to enhance our words with sound. I was particularly skilled in sounding like a siren. You cupped your hands around your mouth to make an excellent crowd.

People requested our duet like a song. Tell us about the accident. Tell us.

But then the story got old and other incidents occurred.

We hit a non-metaphorical bump named Veronica which caused major body damage.

Then everything went silent.

Years have gone by.

I looked for you once only to find you’d been flattened and silenced like a road leading to an unknown destination.

But even if I’d found you, I’d have no way of crossing over the bridges we so thoroughly burned.

And anyway, our story has now melted into so many skid marks left behind on dozens of highways.

What happened has been forgotten.

Whose fault, as unimportant as smoke and time.

Our story ended as suddenly as a bottle flung from a moving car.

Denise Tolan’s work has been included in places such as The Blue Mountain Review, The Penn Review, Atlas and Alice, Hobart, Lunch Ticket, and The Best Small Fictions. Denise has a memoir, Italian Blood, which was named a finalist for the 2024 Eric Hoffer Book award and awarded a Reader’s Choice award.

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