Black Box
by Ariana Kelly

Lying in bed, drifting off to sleep, I thought about how my father was losing his driving leg and that the best conversations we had when I was a kid were when we drove together, just the two of us, first to do errands, then to travel to and from boarding school and college. Scattered around the cab of his Toyota pickup, receipts for building supplies intermingled with cassette tapes of jazz. I can still hear Bill Evans’ introspective piano notes hanging in the air against the white noise of moving sixty-five miles an hour through space. Alone in his truck, cocooned in a glass and metal bubble where we were together but didn’t need to look at each other, my father made optimistic statements about my future—which always seemed tenuous to me—as assured as if issued by a Delphic oracle.