Gina Prodan
'Bred in Euclid, Ohio, I am
a graduate of John Carroll University always in search of graduate
programs to support my fiction writing and its development. I've
been eating a lot of bananas ever since I got into an accident
due to a potassium deficiency. Like most people who have spent
too many hours in cubicle-dependent spaces, I fear offices and
the ideas they support, and, therefore, do not like being defined
in a confined space. My other publications include two poems--"Philip
Larkin and J Mascis Together at Last" and "the empty
body still bled"-- and a short story --"Thanksgiving"--
featured in The John Carroll Review. ' -- Gina
ChocadileG@aol.com
Traffic Hums
Mmm tsi, mmm tsi, mmm tsi. Sitting in rush hour traffic
on 90-East one summer afternoon, a girl and her brother made
their own techno song to pass the twenty-minute commute that
was taking forty-five. Every attention-deficited, spatially-disoriented,
uncoordinated fool seemed to be heading out of downtown Cleveland
and gawking at the flat tire in the left berm or crawling at
an unreasonable pace around the East 55th Street and Eddie Road
curves.
The
day was hot, the streets wavered in the sun, and the metal on
all the cars glinted and made everyone squint. The girl and her
brother were half way home before they realized that home was
indeed a distant prospect.
Other
than the wurr of traffic stop-and-go, there was silence. While
they did find an AM station sporting an extensive Spice Girls
montage, they were deprived of any quality programming because
her car stereo was stolen when her brother borrowed her car a
few weeks before and did not return it all in one piece as he
had explicitly promised. All was quiet except that she drove
an old Beetle, so whether or not traffic was moving, the car
was always wurring. The car was always wurring and rumbling and
shaking. The hypnotic massage was lulling the brother to sleep.
Since the seats hadn't headrests for him to sleep against, his
head bobbled back, spun forward, and would occasionally rest
against the rattling windows that resonated the rhythms of the
engine's lawn-moweresque sentiments.
The
epitome of sibling dynamics, telepathy, and synchronization-despite
the years of smacking, heckling, and "shutting up"-
was realized when the sister instinctively developed and inserted
her own synthesized electronic melody to his beat. They proceeded
in their musical realm of lunacy for at least fifteen minutes
before they looked at each other and laughed.
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