me and me and me

The sign at the Victory Baptist Church in Vergennes reads: God loves you. And you and you. I look around but there are no other cars on the road or parked in the church lot, not a soul about. Just me. When I pass the sign on the way back, same story. I look in the rear-view, and that’s when I see them, just sitting there: a young gymnast with chalkdust and bruises on his thighs, head full of dreams, tapping the ash of his first cigarette on the floormat. Beside him, studying a tattered map, sits a teenage metalhead who wonders whether his girlfriend got rid of the baby. By the window fidgets a coked-up college dropout wearing stolen clothes, pockets bulging with shoplifted cigarettes and the names of people he’d like to be. Rifling through the glovebox in the passenger seat, sits an alcoholic mailman who carries the disease of heartbreak in his heavy satchel. And way in the back, behind the cardboard box of windshield scrapers, blankets and wiper fluid, sits an 11-year-old boy with large ears who wets the bed and snacks on dried cat food. Sniffing nervously, he stares out the rear window, trying to recall the faces that once traveled behind him.