Photo by Bence Balla-Schottner
Cynthia Brandon-Slocum

21 Roadside Spills

  A semi driver swerves around a herd of deer, and just like that, molasses oozes onto the streets of Wagontire, Oregon.
     
  A truck turns over in Amarillo, and bottles of Vitamin Water rattle across the road.
     
  In Indiana, a semi holding honey pours its sweet cargo.
     
  Egg yolk in Pennsylvania streaks concrete like sand art in a glass frame.
     
  Beer kegs roll from a truck that falls off an overpass—driver miraculously okay.
     
  Twelve tons of chocolate paint a Polish highway.
     
  Boxes of red, S-less Skittles burst over a rainy Wisconsin road before reaching the cattle they are meant to feed.
     
  Potatoes drop into ditches in Michigan, Kansas, and South Carolina.
     
  Forty thousand avocados.
     
  Thirty tons of oranges.
     
  Miniature bottles of Fireball whisky—nearly as much plastic as there is product.
     
  $800,000 dollars in dimes ring out onto a road in Nevada.
     
  In Washington, dough rises in a hot tuck, swelling out onto the freeway like a bulbous tumor.
     
  Forty thousand pounds of Popeyes’ biscuits drop like pillows.
     
  Ramen noodles untangle themselves from their single-serve, plastic foam.
     
  A dead whale explodes over the streets, cars, pedestrians of downtown Taiwan.
     
  Thirty million bees swarm from their broken hives on a Texas interstate.
     
  Hagfish, with their eel-like bodies, slap against windshields of oncoming traffic.
     
  Chicken feathers drift through the air on the way to becoming pet food and soap.
     
  A sea of green marbles—thirty-eight thousand pounds of glass orbs—floats over an Indiana highway.
     
  Crates of lobsters longing for the sea.

Cynthia Brandon-Slocum lives in Houghton, Michigan, where she teaches English at Gogebic Community College. She is the managing editor of Sundog Lit and can be found on Twitter @CBrandonSlocum.