Our Numbered Days

by Neil Hilborn

Liminality The best way to get to heaven is to take it with you. Henry Drummond Our headlights snake across the West Texas highway. Out here they’ve only got two kinds of music on the radio: Country and Western. Her hair touches my shoulder in the wind. The road signs say turn ahead. We sing along to songs our parents taught us. Turn ahead. Steep cliff. Her finger is curled around my belt loop. Steep cliff. Pay attention. The road curves away from me, my voice crumples as we clip the guardrail, our back wheels lift skyward, the car spins, flips, the sky and the river bed fight for supremacy, our headlights kick into space. All of our clothes float around us. Her blouse blossoms like a supernova, the change in her cup holders forms constellations glinting in front of our eyes. We are astronauts coming back to earth. When the nickel stars settle in the dust, we hang upside-down, dangling like marionettes from our seatbelts. We unbuckle them, fall to the ceiling that was never meant to be a floor. Her collarbone is broken, the same one she fractured at six years old. The glass is flung around the car in a perfect halo orbit, we’re freezing in our own solar system. As I’m blinking in and out of consciousness, she speaks to me in a voice that comes from just behind my ear, she says: "All that has ever mattered is volume and if you turn up the speakers past the point of sound, to deafening silence, you will hear me again, I will whisper your name from the cracks in the canyon ro...