What Not To Notice

This morning, she didn't notice the car parked cantwise in the drive. She looked up. What is it, her father asked. I thought I heard a plane, she said. She’d known he’d been drinking last night when he picked her up—she could hear it. The trouble parking was only the most explicit sign: backing over the prehistoric ferns, monstrous in the hell of the tails, the Braille of their spores crushed to nothing. Last night, she couldn’t help it, she said, You gonna straighten that up? But this morning she was better. This morning she didn’t even see it.