Escaping Fate

Do you remember when you told me that story of all the Planets in the sky and how they all had different jobs and had different people they were in charge of? That Uranus was a magician and he was friends with all the squirrels and mice or that Neptune was a mystic and for half a dollar he could tell me how I’d die and I said that I’d rather save the half a dollar to buy a gumball and watch the pink or blue or yellow orb roll down the runway until it hit the metal door of the dispenser with a clink. I remember you laughed at that. I remember that your stories would shrink the miles and the hours down into manageable parts until the eighteen hour road trip ended in Des Moines and you said, exhausted, Saturn was the bringer of Old Age but that you hypothesized that if we stayed in the car and just kept driving that Saturn would just get tired and leave us alone so we packed up and took the nearest exit for the Yukon Territory. You looked beautiful then, basking in Saturn’s rage and you still haven’t aged a damn day.