Sweet Home Alabama

Sweet Home Alabama By Rob Rosen The windows were rolled down, the air sticky, humid, smelling of grass and jasmine, manure and magnolia blossoms. The road was empty, cracked, pocked like a moonscape. I’d taken the backroads home. It was longer, for sure, but more scenic. Quieter. It’d been more than a decade since my last visit, and I needed to get accustomed to this place again. To the pace again. I hadn’t been paying much attention to my driving. No point, really. The road was fairly straight, and I was the only one on it. My mistake. The deer probably saw me coming; I hadn’t seen it. My tires skidded for some twenty feet, loudly, the sound stabbing at the silence. I missed the deer. The water oak wasn’t so lucky. Neither was my car, for that matter. The Beemer was barely ten months o