or,
The Big Cloudwrangler in the Sky
A man wakes up from a troubled sleep in the passenger seat of an old car, driving down a long, dusty desert highway. The world is sun-drenched, dry, and yellowed, all except the woman driving the car. She’s wearing faded comfortable jeans, a red and black baby doll tee shirt, and no shoes. Her skin is sliky smooth and white, and her jet black, shining hair is pulled up and away from her face. The man blearily wipes his eyes, scratches his scruffy unshaven face, shuffles a hand through his unkempt hair, and looks dreamily out the passenger side window. Slowly creeping up in the next lane is an old square behemoth of a car, a Buick or Lincoln, possibly a Cadiallac. It has certainly seen better days. The car is painted bumper to rusty bumper in spotty brown and white, like an old Palomino horse in the Westerns. Driving the car, so short that his head barely appears over the driver side door in the window, is a smiling little boy, about 9 years old, with a dark ruffled pageboy haircut. He looks over at the man and smiles a little boys big, broad smile. One of his front teeth is missing. The man in the passenger seat squints in just-awakened confusion and disbelief. The little boy gives him an excited, flailing, whole-arm little boy’s wave. As he waves with his left hand, his right still on the wheel, the car slowly veers off the road and away into the surrounding desert, a long blazing cloud of dust trailing in its wake, driving ever steadily towards the horizon. The man says sleepily and confused to the girl, “Where the hell are we?” and she replies, “Baby, I have no idea.” With a last look out the window at the cloud of dust and the Palomino car vanishing away in the distance towards a dusty, yellow nowhere, the man shrugs absently and hunkers down to go back to sleep.
I bet seeing God is kind of like that.