She is driving. It’s late and they’re the only car on the road. She says to him, “If someone said they would kill you unless you pulled out your own eyeball, would you do it?”
She loves him, has for a little over two years, but who really knows what’s love and what’s fear of having to live alone with her head, no one to distract her from thinking about the size of the universe or the concept of time.
He thinks through her hypothetical, has follow-up questions. How would they kill me? Would it be painful? Could I have tools? Would I be guaranteed medical treatment? How do I know they won’t kill me anyway? They laugh.
He loves her. He’s pretty sure, anyway, has nothing to compare it to other than the way he feels about tacos, about Seinfeld, about the dog he grew up with.
She answers each of his questions definitively: Slowly, yes, no, yes, and you’d just have to trust.
“No,” he says, quickly. “I don’t think I could do it.”
Three miles go by.
“What if they said they would kill me if you didn’t do it? Would you do it then?” They are getting closer to their exit. He watches the trees, a tunnel of pines. He is quiet. He wishes they were home. She is patient. She knows she has just changed the game.
Six miles go by, the distance between Exit 12 and Exit 13. She is impressed with his thoughtfulness, his need to be truthful. He taps his finger on his knee. She thinks about that time last week when she pretended to get a joke he told in front of their friends. He thinks about what it would feel like to bring his fingers to his eye with the intention of removing it, the conviction it would take.
At Exit 15 he is still tapping his finger on his knee. He is scared by the answer he is going to give her. She is scared because she has just realized it no longer matters.
Inside the car, it’s still. Outside the car, the pines disappear at 70 miles per hour. She wonders, or maybe he does, how it’s possible to be both motionless and moving at the same time.
Eight miles until the next exit, the sign says. They both calculate the time it will take to get there.
***
Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her words have appeared in The Sun Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y Lit, and the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Bath Flash, and Oxford Flash anthologies. You can read her work on her website (https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site) or follow her on X or IG (@emilyrinkema)