peach springs.

I wondered if the family dog would still recognize my scent. It felt like eternity, how long I’d been gone. I measured time in sunrises, but my mind was foggy and I lost grip of the number til it became too sad to continue. The sky seemed endlessly blue, static. The radio, static. I didn’t notice it had been idling for hours. The drone seated itself within my mind, letting myself become smooth and tasteless. Nothingness so complete it was almost orgasmic.

We went days without talking. Pulling over at gas stations to pee, buy cans of Coke and jars of pickled vegetables. They sat untouched in the console til my insides ached, then I’d take slow and deliberate bites, staring blearily at the juice that sloshed within. I never saw him eat, not once. Maybe he did when I closed my eyes, but he consumed only cigarettes and soft drinks. Sometimes a beer, but he got ill after a few sips. I’d curl into a ball and cry as he retched on the side of the road.

Figs were in season. Oranges too. We passed groves, the tang trailing us all angelic and oppressive. Fantasies about stopping beneath a tree, standing on the hood of the car and plucking the fruit. I thought of the commercials where women laid out on beach towels, sipping iced tea and sucking on lemons. I envied. In my mind the road twisted into some endless highway, a perfect loop that led us everywhere and nowhere of course. I kept my eyes closed at the gas station. I kept them closed when he took a piss. I kept them closed when he talked to girls through my window, leaning so close I could smell the filth of him.

When I did open my eyes, eyelashes sticky and clumped together, I noticed the dew. In the early morning when the world was grey and slightly wicked, the air sang with the dew. Upon the desert plants. Upon the trees we brushed past on our way to Arizona, it smeared across the windows. I fingered a clump of purple flowers at a rest stop outside of Peach Springs. It left my finger violet and coarse. He stared at me from the gas pump. There was a café, we split a grilled cheese and a vanilla malt. He didn’t touch his share. A waitress came by, middle-aged and greying about her roots. Something about the gentle thickness of her waist and weary expression brought on a childish longing for my mother, an aching nostalgia for the week before. She eyed my bruised face, his full ashtray, tapping her electric-blue nails on the table. She said nothing. I played Blue Velvet. I licked the oil from beneath my fingernails.

I knew it would be her. Even though she wasn’t very beautiful, and her frown was so cruel it was almost frightening. Her shiny Pontiac was broken down on the side of the road, her wrinkled hand pressed over her eyes as a visor. She looked at me with discomfort, where I sat squinting up at her broad, pale face. Her tangerine lips pressed so firmly into that grimace.

“Need a lift, pretty lady?” He asked. I think he believed in his charm. I’m not sure who else would. He’d gone sinewy, all lanky and almost difficult to look at. Hunger pangs from just a glance at his cheek. But old and young women are the easiest to fluster, she was in the car in moments. Blue eyeshadow catching sapphire in the sunlight.

Her screams were so unlike the last two women. Full-bodied and brimming with age and life and begging for her husband’s sake, her children. One aged seven, the other twelve. If we let her go now, she wouldn’t tell anyone. Even with the bag on her head and her hands bound she pleaded. I thought of the first girl, how she tore up her vocal cords, vomited blood onto her lap. I told her about them, my head spinning sleepily. I didn’t notice when she’d stopped screaming. 

I think I found some kind of earnest understanding of the sun. of how it beat down upon me, singed my skin scarlet and peeling. I watched it through the open windows, my hand hanging limp to feel the breeze. I watched through the slitted blinds in roadside cafes, unable to drag my eyes away even when he played Blue Velvet. 

“I thought you liked this song,” he could not fondle my mind.

I helped him clean up her body. Mint-green gloves I found under the motel sink, pulled up to my elbows like some satanic laundress scrubbing at the shower drain. He stood in the doorway and shivered like a sick child. Cool, marble mind. I turned her pale face to the side.

“How old are you?” I asked one night. He looked out the window and shrugged, weak moonlight draped across his shoulders, illuminating his deflated tattoos. He said that he didn’t know. Twenty-something, he guessed.

part of an abandoned short story