Fiction: Dying in a car wreck listening to Kenny Wayne Shepherd

By Lucas Flatt

The Fortis semi up ahead’s wobbling a second time and you know you ought to watch it, quit fucking with your phone and sit up straight and drive. The trees ahead make a flat pyramid in a configuration perpendicular to the highway, one of those deals where you think you could just drive straight into them, but at last the road winds westerly away. Flat, ratty pines, the umbredefeat of fall. Staring into that needley fate you’re struck by the question, are there really guys out there who prefer one Kenny Wayne Shepherd song to another? Surely, the kind of guy who’s all confidence and sack and no deeper comprehension. It brings you back to the playground where the medical wisdom among the fellows had it girls must pee from their buttholes.Speculationwas they get pregnant when you put your whole rig into the vagina. But how do you get the scrotum up there? The question haunts you for years, way after you know it’s a nonstarter–it’s not the If, but the How. That’s what Kenny Wayne Shepherd is in relation to the blues.

You don’t yet know it but in a minute, less, you’re going to eat your own steering column and discover in an instant of knowing-beyond-knowing that everything you ever thought about was the wrong thing; every single step of the way you could have thought about the right thing, but you picked wrong every time. You think it can’t get worse, but Kenny Wayne starts the next track with maybe a megaphone, affecting something he must think is a real delta bluesman’s voice that’d be gauche for an honest to God minstrel show. And the Fortis drifts again into the shoulder and now the guy’s suddenly awake and wants to live and swinging back into your lane and you think it’s all like when you stop marveling at your own idea and you really thought you had something for a minute, thought, Hey, I should write that down, but then again, maybe not, like Kenny Wayne waking up to vanishing melody, thinking he’s got a hit, but it’s gone, it stings, stings the real you in the middle of the shitty meatball armor of your body inside the bouncehouse of your life, stings like remembering something stupid you said in front of a girl at church, the word “fuck” in front of her and your parents, something you knew sounded cool and didn’t, and she’ll never think you’re cool and neither will your parents. So, first you have something, and then you don’t, and you need it, it’s so empty starting all over again, but instead you’re gonnadie–it’s already happening–and at least it’s not to Joe Bonamas.

Lucas Flatt's work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Flash Fiction Magazine, BULL Lit, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, and Puerto del Sol, among others. He won the 2016 Larry Brown Short Story award at Pithead Chapel, and teaches creative writing at Volunteer State Community College.