En Route Mortality / SAMANTHA DEFLITCH

I’ve asked for no more books on tape, so you’ve filled the empty space between us with coffee cups and drawn-out talk. You point to the exit when it appears, though I’m riding passenger-side and can’t do anything for your four wheels. Still, you pitch love across the center console— unnoticed and could-be unaware— speaking to the only miracle left on earth: the salmon run, fish flinging their bodies toward heaven; them the last bright flashes twisting against the sun. None of us make it out alive. Some of us go the jaw of a Kermode bear; others take the gossamer line tied to a wooly bugger fly. Some of us chance to build a redd in a riffle, cover our eggs with upstream gravel, and move along. What are my odds, I ask the kind specialist, of having a good body? He cannot say.

I tell him that I have made the run seventy times over. He cannot say. This water is holy, and even the River Jordan empties itself into the Dead Sea, and the spawning run is the final miracle of the world, I say, but he has gone and left me on exam table paper. Outside, beyond and full of hope, the migration has again taken up its yowl. The yowl is the call of expectation,

15 Finalist Samantha DeFlitch

belief that all this upstream push will make us holy, but we—cold below the ground of a city parking garage—have swallowed it in the throat. Too much hope deadens the miracle, you see. The fish only do their duty, capable things, as do the congregate bears at the edge. I say: Lord, make me capable, like a deer with its dragging leg, and determined. Look: the wide perhaps fades and our long drive home is the sound of chum salmon landed on dry rock, mouth full of psalm and gasp.

Iron Horse Literary Review 16