Luck

Saved by a banjo, she turned into someone forever glancing in the rear-view mirror, someone given to sudden, unpredictable spasms of laughter. The amount of space her arms now claimed with their emphatic gesticulations alarmed even herself: how unladylike! She stopped smoking & enrolled in truck-driving school because, she said, she didn’t ever want to slow down. She’d pull into rest areas on the high plains, hold the banjo in her lap & listen to the non-stop wind.