Rich Youmans

Cuda

You lift the garage door. With a familiar flick, fluorescents bounce off the Moulin Rouge paint, the chrome Rallye wheels, the hood scoops black and narrow as a bandit’s mask. On your workbench lie pieces of a carburetor, that relic of another era. Tell me, when you look, do you see your own life laid open? Do you see the boy you were at nineteen, spending weekends swapping out pistons and camshafts, racing along Airport Road with Mary Ann riding shotgun? Can you still hear her whoops as you ran through the gears, sneaking glances at her bare thighs every chance you could? Do you see yourself coming home from that first job at Sal’s, proud of your grease-covered hands, turning them in the sun to watch rainbows appear? Do you see the young man who bellied low on his creeper, racing Roy Schmidt across the shop floor, like two boys sledding a hill?

hemi's rumble    what the bloodstream remembers

And do you still see that day when Roy left, and you—a husband now, Mary Ann due any day—racked up all the overtime you could, anxious about diapers and a down payment? Do you see the father who looked down at his boy and dreamed of how someday you both might open your own shop? Do you see the days flowing from one to the next, emptying into oil pans as the cars kept coming, their batteries ticking and pistons slapping and ignitions whining? Do you see the man with a touch of gray—”the old pro,” the younger ones called you—who began to wince every time he turned a torque wrench, as if razors were slashing his wrists, and whose shoulders burned for hours after wrestling transmissions? Who tired earlier, and came home one day to find even his furniture had suddenly grown old? Who began to keep his hands under the tablecloth at dinner, hiding his black-rimmed nails? Who waved at his son’s taillights as he headed off to college, after making him promise to keep his hands clean? Tell me, when you look at that carburetor, something that started out as big as a heart, and the chrome that once captured sun and sky, and then down at the floor Rorschached with oil … tell me, tell me, what do you see?

redline    as if the heart could withstand anything

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About the Author

Rich Youmans lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Alice. He published his first haibun in 1994 and, decades later, is still at it. His books include All the Windows Lit (Snapshot Press, 2017) and Head-On (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2018). He is also the co-author, with Roberta Beary and Lew Watts, of Haibun: A Writer’s Guide (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023).

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