Fiction by Christopher S. Bell
Your bare back huddled under the covers, laughing into our chests and exhaling smoke. A wobbly pick-up with a red and blue skateboard sticker on the back window while we waited in the breakfast drive-thru line. Empty condiment packets lining our backseat from past meals before the rusted storage locker chain. A sunny morning view of everything we were leaving behind.
Second-hand furniture and touchscreens meant for ease, before they complicated our comforts, turning every conversation into an obligation. Continue working, to continue buying before bragging after use.
What exactly has changed your life so much? Made inconveniences less daunting? Why must we experience your good fortune in short, chaotic bursts on social media?
We posted pictures with captions, but it wasn’t an act manifested out of expectation. We only wanted to remember, before eventually deleting, in a baron attempt to forget. You snapped flowers, clouds, birds, and uneven graffiti under bridges. A few kisses better kept to ourselves, strung together and soundtracked to a song you’ve just heard. How will it sound tomorrow?
Middle finger to the Jesus billboard before licking the latte foam from your lips. Sugar packets in diner booths of all colors crumbled with substitute creamers twice-spun in swirls by a dressed-down toddler entranced while their tattooed mother swipes on her uninsured cellular phone.
Waking up to your arm over my eyes and a sore back despite the wool blanket under our sleeping bags. Another asshole changing lanes without their turn signal, then again and again, weaving while we’re almost comatose, watching the yellow lines pass underneath, and listening to recommendations from the algorithm. You heart ones worth a damn and talk over whatever doesn’t connect. We fight about something that doesn’t matter when we’re both tired from repetition.
Are we just pretending to listen? Is that all anyone ever is?
Speeding ticket sent to an address that no longer represents us, in a town we don’t live, sent by a man from another who needs to fill a quota. He doesn’t meet our eyes because he already knows how much we loathe his choices. An overlong glance to our backseat, before a thick southern drawl rattles off necessary info. Eleven miles over. Gotta watch yourselves. Make better decisions.
He knows we’re on drugs or have taken drugs or are thinking about all the times we took drugs or will take drugs, just for the hell of taking drugs, but there’s too much crap in our car, and we’re clearly nervous hunks of wind not worth an extra word.
You say it’ll be fine, but we fall asleep thinking about his life after spending the evening heating dried fruits, trying to discuss anything else. The journey will contain views without possibility; places that will appear blurry depending on the number of fiascos in between. As we hold one another for warmth and drift separately, the remaining hiccups carry little merit. You pissing behind a tree, us shitting not two feet from one another in a bush, then throwing the aloe-scented hand sanitizer to one another, regretting only every other breath.
The fried convenience store line, stuck behind an old couple discussing recent robberies while the high school cheerleader with a confederate flag sweatshirt around her waist, plays hand games with her linebacker boyfriend. They all know we’re just passing through, and maybe a part of them wishes they were so lucky, but dreams only turn to animosity somewhere this sultry.
There’s the second cousin you barely know leading us into her basement then struggling with the purple futon mattress. Her daughter dances to a cartoon alphabet VHS on the box television. This next song’s her favorite. We sleep out of time, drive in weird intervals, ping-ponging to forgotten college suitemates and friends of acquaintances, if only to avoid talking for too long about anything specific.
We knew it would be this way, but there’s something about the shifts in equilibrium that make you migraine more than back home. We avoid callbacks to past arrangements, but the dependency to every handshake and door held, each laugh shared over morning coffee and all the provisional compliments from complete strangers, makes the idea of us feel substantial.
You find new friends without ever thinking about how much they’ll fuck you over. All smiles and suggestions that we’re looking better than the day before. It’s apparent we’re not shinier, or level with the earth, sun and sand, despite the sweat. Only way to truly live is by knowing how hot this earth can get. Some folks come around these parts just to melt, and that’s why we’re here, if nothing less than to return to a state forgotten with years of torrid evolution.
The steel green trailer we’ll rent and fill with the contents of our backseat before buying a few window units and considering the ground again. It’s almost as dry as your mouth, the second after we kiss and settle somewhere else for a while.
Christopher S. Bell is a writer and musician. His work has recently appeared in Paper Dragons, Arboreal, and The Dead Mule. His latest album: Radio Reruns will see release by year’s end. He currently resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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