You ask good questions, draw people out
from beneath their stories
the ones we all carry in front of us
we’re the quiet one
or the loud one
or the one who tells the jokes
that no one ever really gets
Our Uber driver likes that you ask her
about the people she drives
she says she doesn’t have stories
but she has
stories. She tells us about
the woman who lost her phone
under the front seat
how the next day it rang for hours,
the front lighting up to show
a picture of a child laughing,
how the woman never called
to claim it, never messaged,
how the battery lasted
for days and days, always
that child laughing, eyes on
whoever was taking the photo,
saying something delightful,
but the driver tells us the woman
had said she didn’t have kids, would
never have kids.
Our Uber driver talks about
how many other drivers she knows,
how they talk about the trouble of
picking up drunks, people running
from something, how many times
they have picked up
ghosts without knowing it. How
do you know they’ve picked
up ghosts, if they don’t even
know it, you ask her.
She looks at us, like we’re
fools, like we too carry our
dead in our phones, under
the lights, under the people we
love who call us over and
over until
they don’t.
–
Chloe N. Clark is the author of The Science of Unvanishing Objects, Your Strange Fortune, and the forthcoming collections Under My Tongue and Collective Gravities. Her work appears in Booth, Glass, Little Fiction, Uncanny, and more. She is co-editor-in-chief of Cotton Xenomorph and can be found on twitter @PintsNCupcakes.