NASCAR Sunday — By Lindsey Pharr

artwork by Lucy Jackson

It’s Mother’s Day, and you wake up mad. Hands up like a boxer against any gesture of solace. This year it’s official: your mother has been dead as long as she was alive. Put that on a fucking Hallmark card. The simple symmetry of an equinox. The basic arithmetic of a life cleft in two. You turn off the phone and hide away in the dark cave of a dive bar to watch NASCAR because you grew up watching races with your dad on Sundays and you find the hypnotic buzz of the souped-up stock cars comforting, like the drone of drunk carpenter bees. You loved #28 until he crashed a helicopter just months after they medevaced your mom. Dale died in that final lap at Daytona the year your grandfather began his decline, and your dad stopped watching the races entirely. Yet they still run, and the fumes still shimmer on the scales of that hot asphalt ouroboros. Nobody talks to you here, thank God. Not even when you go out for a smoke in the bright day, where the cicada roar echoes the sound of engines on TV, and the meady reek of honeysuckle blossom drives it home like a steering column to the chest: there are so many things you can never get back. Your mother. Your father. Your twenties. Your thirties. Every single pet with its perfect, perfect love. But the checkered flag is waving, and the finish line looks exactly like a starting one. The tears that have run for five hundred miles are in your mouth now, and when you take a swig from your sweating bottle the taste is almost sweet.

Lindsey Pharr (she/her) writes from a crooked little cabin outside of Asheville, NC. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. Her work has appeared in Brevity, SmokeLong Quarterly, River Teeth, and elsewhere. For a full list of publications, please visit her website at www.lindsey-pharr.com