The girl stops
and breathes deeply. Even from yards away the sight of the old beaten Dodge is
like coming home. The familiarity sends an ache to her quick. She is aware of
an empty space she hadn’t known was there, a missing patch somewhere below the
left side of her heart. She starts slowly forward, step by slow step, until
suddenly she is right beside the door, breathing heavily as if she had been
running to it all this time. Maybe she has. But she can’t tell what’s real or
fake, made up or dream, because now the familiar is falling over her in waves,
rushing her senses, drowning her under the onslaught, her hand cradling the
familiar grip of the door handle, glancing at that dent in the side, the scar
cementing the back door shut where the deer hit on the way back from that long
trip, in the middle of that long talk, and suddenly she is settling into the
seat and there is the hole like a missing eye where the air shutter should have
been, pushed out and broken, “Goddamnit keep your feet off the dash,” still
echoing, always echoing, echoing in time with the radio, the volume knob broken
off, who cares because the music was always better loud, and the dome light
gives off its solemn glow, the illumination of midnight confessions and secrets
told in the almost dark, don’t worry it never leaves the car, and the girl
fingers the purple beads hanging from the mirror, oh how they swung when the
car turned fast, the two of them, girls on one hell of an adventure the moment
the engine turned over, just keep the windows down and the beads swinging and
everything would set itself right, just never stop. But it did stop, with a
spinning crunch of metal, a flash of light the taste of blood. Now the girl
pulls the beads back, watches them sway once more, then pulls away. Shuts the
door. Makes it stop. A thousand more memories are pressed against the glass but
she walks away, the secret whispers of the past left behind with the friend that
never got to leave.
By Alissa Tsaparikos
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