Fantastic Caverns!

FICTION

by Luke Rolfes

          Dad was upset with my choice. He wanted to get an Old Fashioned by a sparkling blue pool, he said, like that playboy Don Draper from the show Mad Men. An Old Fashioned is a kind of whiskey drink. Mom didn’t laugh. She wasn’t a fan of the show. She’d rather read magazines and take quizzes that say you are this kind of friend, or you have this color of aura, or you and so and so are this kind of compatible. I watch Mad Men with Dad, sometimes, though I don’t understand everything about it. I like Peggy. How she always says exactly what she means. I’d love to be a person like her when I get to be her age. Dad’s favorite is the guy with white hair who doesn’t seem old enough to have white hair. I also think Dad is jealous of Don Draper, how everybody except Peggy falls in love with him. I asked Dad why people were so into Don Draper and he said, They can’t help themselves. As if that were a real answer.
         When we entered the first hills of the Ozark Mountains, they didn’t look much like mountains. More like ripples on a bedspread that wasn’t smoothed all the way out. Missouri was the bedspread. From the front seat, Mom asked me if I would rather have the ability to fly or the ability to turn invisible. I said invisible, but then I took it back and said fly. Mom said, Very interesting, as she does, and then made a note in the magazine with her pen. I looked out the window again. The skies were covered in clouds. The hills on each side of the highway seemed completely empty. Like no one lived there at all.
         Outside of Kansas City, Dad had tried to take Mom’s hand. They usually hold hands when they drive. But Mom wouldn’t take his. They fought on occasion, but this time felt different. They weren’t in the middle of a fight. About a half hour later he tried again. Mom didn’t budge. 
         The signs started to appear more regularly. Fantastic Caverns! Just sixty miles away. Now fifty. Now forty-five!
         I couldn’t wait to get inside those caves. Me exploring the blackness beneath the earth. A world underneath the world. Unexplored passages. Bottomless pits. Maybe finding an artifact from ancient times: an old scroll or a Civil War sword or something.
         Yesterday, I tried simulating what the inside of a cave would be like by standing in the bathroom and turning off the lights. It was dark but not the kind of dark I was hoping for.