Chicanery

Years after the SATs, we found some old vocabulary flashcards and brought them with us on a long drive. The cards were ruffled and bent, a few even torn in half; the definition of diaphanous was arrested at transpare. We took turns quizzing each other, applied our knowledge to the road: I execrate traffic, she said, knuckles white on the wheel. It was perhaps our last drive; weeks later we looked at each other sadly, said nothing—said, There’s nothing left to say. But the remembering is full of words, plangent and fractious; a thousand names for that last saturnine night.