Robert Warf pictured in a white bucket hat and pale pink co-ords. Warf is holding a pair of sunglasses. — Robert Warf

Assistant Editor Andy Sia: In Robert Warf’s “Push-Pull,” driving yields a kind of oppositional syntax. The push-pull motion on the steering wheel emblematizes, on one level, the continual influence and hold of the narrator’s father. But the push-pull motion is also the driving force of action: The series of negation and assertion in the story enact the meandering course through self-discovery and self-actualization. By the end, the car—the machinery of syntax—is wrecked, and the speaker walks away: toward a new rhythm, toward another way of beginning.

Listen to Warf read the piece:

Push-Pull

My father taught me to drive with hands at seven and five. Push-pull. My father does not know how I do it now, although I’m sure it matters to him just the same. The way I do it. The way he doesn’t.

You see my father didn’t leave me. He didn’t abandon me, my family, any of that. He wasn’t absent. He wasn’t one of those fathers you know aren’t capable. No, he didn’t do anything ill intentioned.

What he did was stay.

* * *

I am not that kind of man. I have spent my time spending money not yet mine. I have spent time across different states becoming the kind of man I set out to be in the previous. One after another. On top the other. Transparent. Same.

* * *

Previously, maybe several years ago, I would’ve told you more about myself. Gone on a little spiel selling you a person I am not. Selling you on a uniqueness not unique. There is only one way to spell sorry.

* * *

Let me tell you what I need to. What I need to say for myself. My father taught me to drive the same way he taught his students in drivers ed. Seven and five. He taught this because it’s the safe way. The right way. It’s so when you collide with something you shouldn’t, the airbag will hit what it should. At ten and two the airbag will hit your wrists first, sending them into your face ahead of its weight. My father didn’t care if you thought it didn’t look cool to drive like that or if none of your friends drove like that. He only cared that it could be the little thing that lets you walk away.

And this is what I have done.

Robert Warf is from Portsmouth, Virginia and is a PhD student at Oklahoma State University. He has work in/forthcoming in 3:AM Magazine, Post Road, Forever Mag, Write or Die Magazine, and Bat City Review among others. You can find more of his work at robertwarf.com.