I used to wonder: How can she do so much crank and still be fat? Most of the speedfreaks I knew were scrawny skin stretched tight over skeleton bones. She hits the boulevard, tires screeching, as if she’s just remembered something important, something crucial, like: I’M OUT OF DOPE.

I hop out and wave, but she’s already gone, peeling rubber, like the cops are coming. He said she’d burned him he wanted his money back. She’s never lost a fight, and I’ve seen plenty, like the one last night with the badass biker. She slams on the brakes the engine’s running, gunning itself, crap pouring out the muffler.Ī woman walks by and shoots us a look, but scurries away when she sees my mother’s face. Such a tiny little lot, full of teeny toy cars. She steers that boat into the parking lot. If they do my mother will pound on the counter and shout QUIT PICKING ON MY KID. I’m late, again, but they won’t ask for a note. We cruise the main drag to the elementary school. We sail into town at thirty miles per hour, our SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE DEPARTMENT bumper sticker flapping, past the disappointed cop who’s waiting for speeders. She punches the brakes and the cigarette lighter. The city limits sign suddenly looms ahead. I’ve never been alone with my mother before. Usually the backseat’s full of kids, poking and pinching and slugging each other, until my mother hits like a meteorite out of the blue, and hard. This baby handles great, my mother shouts, feeling in her purse for a cigarette. I’d watch that fish’s mouth open and close and wonder what it was trying to tell me. Or sometimes it ate ten times a day because we all wanted to feed it we’d never had a pet.

No food, sometimes, when my mother forgot. A torrent of distortion blasts out of the speakers her theme song, the music she hears in her head when things get broken and out of control, cops pounding on the door in the middle of the night. My mother’s fooling with the tape deck, hunting all over for her favorite cassette, looking through stuff on the floor, the dashboard. One hundred miles per hour in a ton of creaking metal, the engine screaming, one hundred and ten. The Buick shudders as if it will fly apart, pieces shooting into space tires, doors, my heart. We hurtle through a world of streaming color. I’ve just learned to count to one hundred in school.

Wanna see this thing do a hundred? she says. We’re flying down the road in this big old car, my mother at the wheel, a Marlboro in her mouth, the windows open, hair blowing all around, her pink arm spreading out the window.

Big Time by Cynthia D. Grant