 Hybrid Audio presents Cadillac Orpheus by Solon Timothy Woodward Read for you by Dion Graham What he would suddenly remember was how dry her lips had been His mother's as if she had had a fever such crinkle pinkie-challs as if instead of flesh the glassine panel of an envelope had brushed his forehead This was what came to him watching his father's face his mouth The boy was seven or eight He had not anticipated his father's crying No boy expects to see his father weep He tried to focus on his father's hands massaging the steering wheel But the boy found himself instead tracking where the tears and sweat gathered in his father's moustache The boy's cousin was in the back seat asleep through it all The revolving light of the sheriff's sedan pulsed through the interior of the car His father's car as his father emphatically reminded his mother as she pushed the boy about the house to gather his belongings pea coat, toothbrush, boomerang, a puppet The boy's hands found these things automatically When his mother came to the car carrying the green and tan valise that was hers in miniature his father twisted it from her and threw it under the carport Jack, shit from you I can buy him whatever the fuck you got in that suitcase That was when his mother kissed him quickly, furtively Her lips were parched She had stopped crying a while back She was exhausted You're just too fucking drunk to care Ain't that right? His father heckled The sheriff had not anticipated confronting a grown colored man crying at the steering wheel A woman, yes That could be foreseen, even expected Fear Maybe manipulation Who knows If he had been privy to the emotions over the past 24 hours traveling with two young boys Fatigue maybe But what the officer would not know was that his father had actually been cheerful up until the moment they'd been stopped They had been lost for a few hours on access roads and traces spidering through the Tennessee backcountry We're meandering His father said turning the steering wheel to and fro like a child playing and driving The car zigzagging across the red baked clay Forgot damn meandering His father shouted at the windshield The boy flinched at his father's voice The glass was a mire of sodden leaves and cicadas and other brown debris But there would be the brief tags of emerald luminescence from the fireflies which the boy welcomed with drawing from his father and the parched lips of his mother to the gray night foliage and verdant memory His cousin had been asleep through all 476 miles from Georgia to their present location Paul had slept through the leaf stripping rain through the stultifying noon heat through the boom and scribble of the lightning cascades whose glare the boy found frustrating like the fireflies only a hiccup a hesitant glimpse of the surrounding orchards and hills But his cousin sleep was where he primarily resided Paul seemed to sleep through his childhood through natural disasters family upheavals Impressive. Paul had slept through the rabies child incident It had been a neighbor's mongrel one late spring just above the Florida panhandle Only when the girl was slavering, flailing in rictus did someone connect the emured bats, the dog and the girl The girl was a younger sister to Paul She was only nine and sick began barking The noise, a pulse of wind a bad smell would bring on a laryngeal spasm then a choking squeal She became haunted snapping She died in fever recoiling at the slosh of a washbasin Is that fucking dog One of the uncles Simon suddenly recounted He told the other brothers eight of them in awe of seeing the dog jogging and whimpering with a wreath of four or five fluttering bats Sample complete. Ready to continue?