Further Out Than You Thought by Michaela Carter

floor. She could smell smoke, and as if speed would help her escape it, she drove faster, down South La Cienega, past the hills and the metal oil pumps that always reminded her—with their long, slow necks rising and falling—of dinosaurs drinking water, what were they called, brachiosaurs? She drove past the fields of clover and mustard—fields—as if from another time, so green and yellow, so open. Past the cemetery, through green lights and into the outskirts of neighborhoods, past dollar stores, pawn and gun shops and places for payday loans, to where the river of traffic grew turgid, to where the smoke was thick and then thicker, the black smoke, and she was stopped, trapped, cars in front of her, cars behind her, and on the other side of the street, not two lanes away, the gas station was on fire. The Arco station she’d driven past a hundred times was sending its massive smoke signal to the sky. She could hear what sounded like distant screams.
    At first, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. Hundreds of people were on a street where there should have been only cars. People were running across the street, between the stopped cars, toward the flames. It took her a moment to understand. Through the smoke, behind the gas station, was a Kmart. And the people running toward it were men—black men—in groups of five, six, seven. On the sidewalk, other men, white men, were walking with their video cameras that read NBC, ABC, CBS. They were recording everything—the looters, the flames, the traffic, the black air. This was news. People across the country—hell, all over the world—would want to watch this; with a bag of potato chips, they’d prop their feet on the coffee table, open a Coke and settle in.
    Here she was, in the middle of a full-blown riot. Her attempt to avoid it had landed her a front seat at the spectacle.
    She looked in the rearview mirror at the car behind her, an old blue Pontiac. Four black teenagers, looking ready to fight, filled it with the power of youth and rage. They were wearing muscle shirts and had the muscles to go with them. They were sweating, waiting for the perfect moment to jump from the car and join the action. The one in the passenger seat—who looked the youngest, all of sixteen—gripped a baseball bat.
    She rolled up her windows and locked her doors. She went to put the inside air on—her car had no air-conditioning, but at least she could keep the smoke out, or try to—and her hand was so shaky she turned the tape deck on, too, and Bing was singing. Would you rather be a fish? A fish won’t do anything but swim in a brook. He can’t write his name or read a book. To fool the people is his only thought. Yes. Without a doubt. She would rather be a fish. A pig. A monkey. Anything but a human.
    She turned it off. She had to concentrate.
    Where were the police? The fire engines?
    The line of cars ahead was backed up as far as she could see and the black smoke from the flaming gas station was a wave, an ocean she was under.
    And she’d never felt so white.
    Yet she was part Latina. One-fourth, to be exact, from her mother’s mother, Carlotta, from Globe, Arizona, a dancer with fire in her blood. But no one would ever guess Gwen’s ancestry. Her skin was pale, the majority of her ancestors having come from England, that cold, damp, dismal island, breeder of consumption, of whalers, and of slave traders.
    Her right foot shook as it pressed on the brake. Drinking the last from her bottle of water, she spilled most of it down her shirt.
    This, she realized, was anger. Manifested, en masse. She was surrounded by it, stuck inside it. Nothing to do but feel the heat, watch the flames spread and rise. Anger. It was the emotion Gwen had the hardest time feeling. Even when she’d acted, it had evaded her, like a memory just beyond her reach. She longed to feel it percolate inside her, to feel it seize her, as it did