My old best friend used to drive a petrol blue Ford Fiesta
that barreling downhill topped out at 65 miles per hour. His
front wheel flew off the axle once as he burned up McCarthy
road. Senior year. No injuries. I captained a Nissan Quest that
was opal, its starter was shot. The cars were a shabby pro
wrestling tag team but we had wished for details to recall years
later so that one day, we could say, ‘that was when he and I lived
in horse country’ when remembering ourselves to strangers; the
Fiesta and the Quest both had those automatic seat belts that
vroomed down on a track when the door shut, which we found
corny, a trite cosmetic ornamentation that did not really enhance
safety but was included so as to better compete with foreign brands,
finer pieces of machinery prized for the fitness of their suspensions,
space age bodies, spooky muscle, the wicked torque passed down
from speed freak precursors, cold intelligence in the turn, halting
in the nick of time, triple-x silhouettes, or even their high capacity
for accommodating a family one day down the line, their bucket
seats reserved in relevant futures, braver models without any need
for novelty, vehicles that reflected us who, smack dab in corn country,
not horse country, were none of those things but who could say and
have it be true that that was what we saw when we saw mustangs.
Tariq Shah is the author of Whiteout Conditions (Two Dollar Radio, 2020). A Best of the Net award nominee, recent work appears in or is forthcoming from Pleiades Magazine, Electric Literature, Joyland Magazine, Prelude, Diagram, jubilat, Heavy Feather Review, and New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims Anthology edited by Kazim Ali (Red Hen Press, Nov 2021). A former peace corps volunteer in Mozambique, Tariq was born in Illinois and now lives in Brooklyn, NY.