One of my students, a poet, works at a gas station by night. I picture her under the fluorescent lights, composing sonnets and slam poems (her favorite), reading them aloud to the empty store in rural New Mexico, where only a few cars pass by. When the door chime rings, she stows her notebook under the counter and straightens the array of potato chips next to the cash register.

One night in October, the air just starting to chill, her friend comes in. The student, no doubt, has friends everywhere. She’s the kind you’d meet and instantly want to know better—quick with hugs, a sparkle in her brown eyes, an easy laugh, the kind of person who’s willing to ask hard questions. She loves Halloween and Edgar Allan Poe, dark burgundy lipstick, and black nail polish. Across the counter, the friend asks for shots, the ones in the little bottles, a dollar each. The student—the poet, the shopkeeper—pulls four from the shelf. The friend is short on cash, and the student digs out pocket change to cover the fourth shot. The hard question she will ask, for rest of her life, is whether that was the right thing to do. The two women exchange good-byes and promise to get together soon. The door chimes, then taillights disappear down the road, somewhere into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains blanched by the white moon.

Northern New Mexico—its winding highways dotted with tiny towns and glittering roadside memorials (descansos, locals call them)—is no place I’d want to drive at night. My students don’t understand this fear, perhaps because it is a fear they cannot afford to have. Many work graveyard shifts or rise at 3 a.m. to commute an hour to Santa Fe, where Starbucks pays better than anything in our small town. The students, most of them from this rural community, don’t see danger the way I do. They don’t know large cities like I’ve lived in, with bright lights stretching over the interstate, with plentiful places to stop if you break down. Cities, of course, have their own set of dangers, different from the those that lurk here, just around a hairpin turn on a mountain pass, or across a median of sagebrush and into oncoming traffic.

The student—the poet, the shopkeeper—pulls out her notebook. She can’t hear what is already too far away to discern: the screech of tires, the crunch of cars colliding. She can’t see her friend’s blood staining the highway, marking the spot where a descanso will soon shimmer on the roadside. Instead, she sees that the gum and candy are in tidy rows, the little liquor bottles restocked, the gas pumps unoccupied. Instead, she hears her own voice reciting slam poetry into the bright, silent store. As the student counts her cash drawer, closing up for the night, a moth flutters against the window, pressing to get in, using all the strength left in its tissue-thin wings, hovering until it dies trying or gives up and flies toward another light.

-Lauren Fath

Lauren Fath is the author of the lyric essay chapbook A Landlocked State (Quarterly West, 2020) and My Hands, Remembering: A Memoir (Passengers Press, forthcoming 2022). Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Gertrude, High Desert Journal, and Post Road, among others, and has received Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. She lives in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where she is an associate professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University.