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This car is too big for our abbreviated family. Dad drives, and I sit in the back where he can see me, as if I would budge, just the two of us since the accident that reduced us by half. Beside him is empty. Beside me too. He has a metaphorical way of holding the wheel at twelve o’clock with his left hand backwards like he’s prepping for a hard right or fighting a skid, like he’s shaking his fist at whatever’s ahead, ready to flip the bird. Equally newsworthy, his favorite parking space is alongside any unattended female, and every time we somehow get the checkout line with the cutest cashier. I learn what I observe, not what I’m told. It’s clever for a man his age to tell them what we’re up to, to frame himself a single dad buying game cartridges with his son. When they smile, at him, not me, he appreciates me with gum and batteries. Just once he should tell them why he’s single and who was driving if not drunk then nearly, and who was climbing over the seat to get to the front when we ran into a barricade that was meant to stay put and did. We’re survivors, Dad and I. We flew through the moon roof like superheroes side by side and into the night. I would have been belted in, like now, like Mom and Junior were. Dad never believed in them. The belts, I mean. He doesn’t look at the passenger seat. He doesn’t look at me either. But if he has to brake suddenly, which happens a lot, he reaches back to restrain Junior, when I’m the one who’s sitting here. I don’t get it. The living were always better off without Dad’s kind of protection.
Original Copyright © February 21, 2007
Revised Copyright © February 23, 2026
I’m sitting at a red light falling in love with the passenger in the next car. She’s cute and small and irrepressible, but mostly hidden by the headrest, and dark and coy and mysterious and of completely indeterminate age, and smart! When she turns her head just so, contemplating her driver, I can see enough, through the tinted glass and the relentless glare of the bird-stained windshield, to know she’s curious and contemplative. A brilliant browline crowns a clear and deepset eye of sparkling darkness. I feel you judging me. Love at one car distance is every bit as legitimate as love at a distance of one breath mingling with another, near enough for our tongues to snap like wit. I’ve had the skin-on-skin sort. The varsity variety. I’m not sure it was any better. I’ll catch her eye when I pass alongside, if this maddening gridlock doesn’t unhinge me. I want to tell her this traffic is the worst since cops invented red lights to raise ticket revenues, right? I know. Observations like that should win her heart unless my heart is lying. She’ll be mine to amuse and disappoint in a minute or a mile. But first, eliminate the other driver, who doesn’t deserve or appreciate her. How’s his traffic material? Green light, finally. As our cars pull even, her driver’s head blocks her from offering me her face. To pledge in my direction. With her eyes. That I am not alone in love. Her driver will concede our love is destiny, or regret it. He moves aside, I believe, in surrender; I see her; she is stunning. The most magnificent springer spaniel, dark of brow and bright of eye, purebred of champions clearly, this one, raised from greatness for greatness, vivacious and irrepressible, age approximately three.
Original Copyright © February 10, 2000
Revised Copyright © February 06, 2026
Very Short Novels 
This is a close relative of a Very Short Novel titled Short for Family from 20 years ago. The revisions…