Rant

just touching the edges, saying, “Where did you acquire this extraordinary coin?” And Echo hits the gas, throws us around the next right, the Shark still chewing our paint.
    Tina Something: Everybody knows a full moon means a Newlywed event. A Honeymoon free-for-all. Doing this every month for a couple years, you pile up racks of wedding gowns. Racks. Ruffled shirts and penguin tuxedos. My favorites are pretty sherbet-pink bridesmaid dresses. But it’s wedding gowns most Party Crashers wear: the big full skirt, the poofy veil. Half the time, one team plows into the back end of another team, and between the two cars eight brides pile out to scream at each other in the emergency lane. Some brides with hairy arms and Adam’s apples jumping under their square, stubbly chins. The knuckles of one hairy hand holding the train of a dress, to show greasy work boots underneath. All the teams in gowns and veils, black people, white people, women or men, all brides look alike.
    Echo Lawrence: The full moon is the best night for starters. The flag is so easy to spot. You write “Just Married” in shaving cream down the car doors and across the trunk and hood. You tie some white streamers to the top of the radio antenna and put on your best Sunday clothes. A starter team is out ten dollars, tops, to get into the game.
    Veteran newlyweds, they have to count back on their fingers. Toyota, Buick, Mazda, Dodge, Pontiac. Red, blue, silver, black. This month, this honeymoon might make a vet’s fifth car, ready to get pounded with dents.
    Shot Dunyun: Any Honeymoon Night, you’ll see another “Just Married” car in every block. Brides stand on street corners, looking for loose grooms. Grooms wait on curbs, wearing top hats, hoping to wave down a bride with her own wheels.
    From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: A crucial aspect of dressing for any Honeymoon Night is to fasten your boutonniere with a portion of double-stick adhesive tape. In the event of a car accident, you do not want a long straight pin stuck anywhere adjacent to your heart.
    Echo Lawrence: Another piece of advice: Scotchgard your seats. Before Tina Something, we had a newby lookout in the backseat during the pulse. A Shark plows into us, tags our right rear corner so hard we’re spun sideways, traffic and headlights coming at us from every direction, horns blaring, and this newby lookout, she takes a leak. Damage from the tag was nothing Bondo won’t fill. But we were sponging that girl’s piss out of the backseat for weeks.
    Shot Dunyun: The Shark still tagging our ass, he’s some asswipe in a Maserati Quattroporte Executive GT painted Bordeaux Pontevecchio. Craning around, I watch out the back window, and he’s not a lone Shark. Riding shotgun is a cloud of pink. A bridesmaid. Our Tina Something we ditched. Her teeth make a round oval, her mouth’s that wide open. Tina’s laughing that hard as the Shark’s bumper clubs our ass.
    Still holding Tina’s bouquet of fake flowers, Rant’s twisting inside his seat belt, trying to see, and says, “Why’s he after us…?”
    Echo Lawrence: After you’re tagged out, the brides and grooms, the best men and bridesmaids, they all fake their anger. Fakescreaming and pop-eyed. Fake-fighting for the people slowed down to watch. The rubberneck effect. Passing traffic slows to a crawl to watch the spectacle. The police never stop, not for a fender bender.
    The wedding parties, they’re just trying to milk out the moment their life gets slow. The pulse when two cars come together.
    These are regular people watching their lives squeezed down into dollars, all the hours and days of their life compressed the way the crumple zones of a car get sacrificed. The total hours of their waiting tables or sorting mail or selling shoes, it gets screwed down until they have enough money to pool and buy some wheels. A wedding dress. String some tin cans and buy some shaving cream.
    The next new-moon night, these people are cruising or getting cruised. They’re driving and waving to the rest of us not in the action. They’re watching in every direction for a Shark, listening for the clatter of enemy tin cans, until another team of “Just Married’s” see them and give chase. A swerve and black tire marks, one car darts after another so fast the tin cans stop touching the road. One red light and—that’s the moment time explodes. What automotive crash-test engineers call “the pulse.”
    From the Field Notes of