The Drive

by Jamie Iredell

The sun had sparkled over the eastern rim of the Truckee Meadows. The heat already rippled from the parking lot’s asphalt. Me and Jon did the McDonald’s Drive Thru for breakfast burritos and coffee, both of which nearly equaled the sun’s heat, literally. By that I mean that after those 93 million miles through space, through that electromagnetic field blocking hazardous radioactivity, and the sixty miles of our atmosphere, it was around a hundred degrees. So maybe the coffee was hotter. You might think I talk a lot. But I’m like a book when I drive: everything’s between the covers. So me and Jon swerved up the Truckee River gorge and the mountains had begun to yellow with autumn. The granite made me think of a dentist’s office: all gray and menacing, the boulders like molars. Jon himself was quiet. He liked birds. They hardly talk at all.

Jamie Iredell was born on the Central Coast in California, then went to college at the University of Nevada, Reno. He left Reno, after earning his MA in Literature and the Environment, to head east to Atlanta for his PhD in creative writing at Georgia State University. He is the author of When I Moved to Nevada (forthcoming from The Greying Ghost Press). His writing has appeared in many magazines, including The Chattahoochee Review, Zone 3, The Pedestal Magazine, The Literary Review, ISLE, Descant, elimae, and Mud Luscious. He is a founding editor of New South, and is production editor for C&R Press. He has been known to enjoy watching turtles swim in southern creeks.
Back to Issue One: Fall 2008