My great aunt Mel was a woman whose heart burned with a ferocity inversely proportional to the strength of her body, just as staunchly catholic as her twelve siblings, and likely more so per her own quiet intensity. At the ripe old age of two she caught polio and spent near an entire year of her life in an iron lung. Her small body atrophied in that brazen bull, circulating the very air into a calloused hoof to press down onto her chest. One summer I got it in my mind to be a lifeguard due to some adolescent fancy, and when I learned about the iron lung I was immediately reminded of my CPR training. The dummies that were meant to simulate a drowning pool patron had such an uncanny appearance, with all their facial features yawning except their eyes, which were nothing but empty slits set in flimsy, undead skin. I had to avert my eyes whenever I pushed against its false rib cage, meanwhile the instructor discussed how often CPR results in breaking the ribs of the drowning in order to reset their breathing. The lung was a never ending CPR session on a real, living, conscious child, rather than a limbless rubber puppet.
She ate, slept, lived in the machine, only leaving it to be bathed as she felt herself drowning, submerged within the oxygen her own lungs could not handle. It must have genuinely felt like a gift from God to at last leave that hulking, tumorous organ behind. She was like a fish who, by the grace of God, had managed to learn how to breathe on land. She lived long enough to reach 77, making it past the post of some of her siblings, siblings who never had to learn from scratch basic mechanisms of survival. She found and maintained her own beauty and autonomy in respect to that ingrained frailty, even managing to overcome pancreatic cancer. I had a lot of respect for her growing up, being a girl who similarly had to learn so much from scratch which my sisters had been inundated with since childhood, whether that be makeup or protecting myself against the advances of strange men. I felt further kinship with her when, on the occasion that I had been helping weed her garden, she confided in me a brief sojourn she had enjoyed in her long lost middle age.
In 1988, upon donating a stack of airport paperbacks to her local library, Mel met a woman of 46 who was also unmarried and childless, though for distinct (if not irrelevant) reasons. They sat together on a park bench and conversed for naught but 45 minutes before developing an intense friendship, agreeing to exchange tomes as part of an interpersonal book club as an excuse to spend greater and greater time in each other's company. My aunt described her confidant as a “dignified beauty.” Keeping her hair platinum blonde hair in a tight and obedient bun that shined with strands of silver, Charlotte had vibrant blue eyes fogged over with cataracts and hid behind humble spectacles and a plump, yet athletic figure shrouded in floral dresses and cardigans that could sufficiently obscure her blithe chest.
For two years, their friendship became more and more intimate, often arranging for rooms together on weekends at nearby motels. This all came to a sputtering stop when Mel received her cancer diagnosis, as her health immediately declined, and Charlotte begged for the opportunity to care for her. My aunt refused. She could not bear to tell her family the truth about her relationship to her “friend,” so her siblings cared for her instead. Charlotte stood by and watched these strangers who only vaguely resembled her love go about feeding her, providing her company, and doing housework to keep her in relative comfort. Charlotte saw this as her right, and she grew dread the presence of Mel’s family. When the cancer had finally gone into remission, Charlotte bid Mel a curt farewell, deciding it too painful to stay in the same country where her true love slept, taunting her with the very impossibility of a complete happiness.
Once my aunt did pass away, it was a sudden (yet not altogether unexpected) fate for someone of her advanced age. She was actually in the presence of her siblings when it happened, a simple, unfortunate fall, whereupon they immediately took her to the hospital. In her three day stay she seemed to be making a steady recovery, only to pass peacefully in her sleep. I was on campus, heading back to my dorm from a class on aesthetics when my mother called with the news. It felt unreal, like I would discover it was just a cruel joke when I saw her face at the next family gathering. Not until I attended her wake in an ill-fitting button up shirt and a sweater meant to suppress my breasts did I finally accept the reality of her demise. Her carcass was there, though my rubbernecking instincts were not so strong to go examine it closely. I saw more than enough peeking through her church’s well-wishers to identify the waxy countenance, embalmed and stitched up like taxidermied roadkill for their viewing pleasure. Both of us were put here on display ascheap facsimiles of ourselves, more pleasant and simplified versions palatable to the loved ones. The only difference was that my real eyes, burning with emotion, were still set in my plastic face. There was nothing behind the corpse’s glassy stare. I made up my mind then and there that I was to be cremated.
She did not have much to her name when she left us, but she did leave me with her car, one she had offered to sell me on the cheap when I told her that I would need a vehicle for graduate school. It was not perfect, the chassis had chipped paint and sun damage, but it was still solid, a Honda with barely any miles from the near decade she had owned it. The gratitude I felt when I discovered that she had likely left her most valuable possession to me was immense and inexpressible. We had only known each other for a short time, but it made me wonder if she felt some unspoken kinship with me beyond the bounds of blood. After replacing the modified wheel meant to account for her disability, I decided to take a trip with it to go visit my girlfriend once my last undergrad semester let out.
The night before I had planned to set out, I sat in that car for an hour to get a better feel for it and discovered something under the passenger seat. The car was immaculate when my father and I went to pick it up, lacking even a characteristic smattering of dust, so we had just assumed that Mel or one of her siblings had cleaned it out for us. Only now did I get the chance to find this folded piece of paper, the kind of solid paper used for printing certain postcards. Opening it up in the driver seat, I soon recognized it as a parting letter:
Dear Melony,
My darling, it has been a hard clutch of years since I left you behind. I was a coward, I believed you to be the one who had wronged me, when you were facing the prospect of an imminent demise. I do not expect your forgiveness, and I have every expectation that you might burn this letter, and the car, and all my remaining memory to the ash it all amounts to. But, maybe you do have some remaining glimpses of joy from our fleeting time together. Whenever I think of you my heart still croons with yearning. I went abroad to fulfill a youthful obsession of mine, reignite through the vain hope that it might somehow make us whole. Of course, it could not, and once I finally came to accept that I had already made something abominable out of myself. I knew I could never bear to expose you to this hideousness, so I once again retreated into my well-worn niche of cowardice and shame. You will never see me again, but I have seen you, confident and aging gracefully as I no longer can. I have decided to give myself to you as I once did those many years ago and allow you the chance to decide my fate. Whatever your choice may be, I beg of you to hold onto the photo I have enclosed with this letter, so that you know what I have tried to achieve. Yet, through it all, you were always my only true goal.
Yours forevermore,
Charlotte
There was no photo enclosed with the letter, so I figured that it was either tucked away somewhere in my aunt’s house or she had chosen to do the precise opposite of lover’s instructions. It seemed then that I finally had an answer as to why Mel had bequeathed the car to me. It was the only remaining memento of her long lost affair, thus she could not entrust it to those who had (unknowingly) kept them apart. Now knowing this, my enthusiasm to see my love was further redoubled, and this discovery convinced me that the only appropriate act of gratitude would be to honor one lost sapphic love with the fulfillment of another. Needless to say, my next decision was foolhardy. I elected to move up my schedule and to begin my journey that very minute.
The highway was sparse as I made great headway to my destination, only the occasional interloper appearing in my rearview mirror before quickly passing me. It was midnight by the time I made it over state lines. I should have been terrifically anxious, considering that I had next to zero experience with driving in the dark, but my heart was beating steady. There was a thermos of coffee in my cup holder and, more importantly, I felt so awake and alert that precaution seemed extravagant. When you excise the natural misgivings, there’s something strangely cozy about the highway at night, the low humming glow of the street lamps and familiar tunes played by some sleepy DJ on the oldies station. It was around that time when I switched off the radio, midway through a particularly snowy rendition of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.”
For most people, indulging in this kind of calm might border on lotus-eating, transforming oneself into a careless Odysseus of the road. I, on the other hand, felt invulnerable against that siren cry. The smooth extension of my body through my vehicle already felt like a magnificent dream, my hands and the wheel were a singular organ, and translucent roots sprouted through my legs to link up the rhythm of the tires to the beat of my heart. The headlights were cat’s eyes piercing through the thin veil of night, and I had become a megalithic panther bounding hungrily across the modern landscape. Not even passing thoughts of my visit and coming activities with my beloved could dilute this hallucinatory euphoria, only further intermingling with my newfound obsession. In my fantasies, we were not making love in her bed, but instead the backseats of my chariot, pressing our naked flesh together like overeager newly weds who cannot hold off until the hotel. It was about halfway through this thought when I spotted her, the hitchhiker, standing hunched against a stop sign.
She wore a green sundress that came down to her knees and a ratty gray cardigan, carrying every other necessity in a satchel that she clutched tightly to her chest. She shivered in the dark, likely more from her predicament than the pleasant chill of the summer night, and when she saw me through the window she made a modest attempt at flagging me down. Looking back, the action had seemed foreign to her, far too restrained, and it was certainly probable that I was the first motorist in some time whose car and femininity were aesthetically unthreatening enough to take a shot. I don’t think that, under normal circumstances, I would have really entertained the idea of letting her catch a ride, or I would have at least gone about it in some different fashion, but my intoxication clipped my better judgment. The front of my car passed just beyond the stop sign and I beckoned her to enter the back cab. Once she opened the door and crouched down into her seat, I could now tell that her makeup had been running.
“Where are you headed?” I asked, my voice cracking from lack of use, the question itself wholly asinine thanks to my complete lack of knowledge on anything but my own destination.
“Doesn’t matter…” She said haltingly, “just take me to the next stop with a motel in whatever direction you’re heading. Shouldn’t be more than a few miles.”
“You okay?” I prodded.
“I…” out of all the questions I could have asked, this one ranked high with the dreadful to her in that moment. “Just… troubles with my fiance…”
“She left you on the side of the road?” I asked incredulously, staying about five miles-per-hour below the speed limit to better focus on the conversation at hand.
“No. she…” She paused to process what I had said, “how did you know that my fiance’s a woman?”
“Well,” I promptly responded, “I’m going to visit my own girlfriend, so it just seemed like the most poetic assumption.”
In truth, I had known she was a lesbian, though not due to any kind of amorphous ‘gaydar’ bestowed unto me by queer intuition, I just knew implicitly. I had this sixth sense that amplified my other senses rather than mollifying them. Usually my ability to smell was horribly limited, which I suspect might have been the case due to a deviated septum, but I could catch a very thorough whiff of a faint smell emanating from her. The closest that I could place it would have been to the speckled petals of a lily, which I had suspected to be her perfume. In retrospect, though, everything in the car radiated that scent ambiently, whether that be the hitchhiker, the upholstery, myself, and yet I was the only one present with the capacity to notice.
“Your girlfriend…” the hitchhiker says, after five minutes of uninterrupted driving fugue, “what is she like?”
“That’s a tough question,” I replied, “do you want me to tell you that she has eyes like crisp morning fog, or that her smile curls up like the leaves of a tree reaching for sunlight? That her messages are the first thing I look forward to in the morning, and that her sweet, bubbly voice is what draws me to sleep at night? That she is kind and neurotic, adoring and jealous, radiant and comfortingly mundane? That she has sensitive breasts, and full cheeks that snap like a steel trap? Which of these answers seem appropriate?”
“Huh… she doesn’t sound much like my fiance,” unexpectedly, she lets out a short giggle “except for the butt.”
In contrast to her restrained laughter, I burst with unrestrained guffaws, both from the shock of my unthinkable uncouthness and her surprisingly apt response. Something was definitely off with both of our attitudes, though the skew was otherwise fairly slight, she was obviously deeply upset and on the verge of tears and all my concern was genuine. Even under the most congenial normal circumstances, I tended to be fairly conservative in divulging details about my girlfriend, which I would tell myself came from a desire to safeguard her privacy. Moreover, I had the distinct impression that my interlocutor should have been deeply uncomfortable at this point (as I would have too), yet she took my outburst in her melancholic stride. I felt giddy, I wanted to test this strange atmosphere, to see if I could get her to sing show tunes. The road had been completely barren since I picked her up, and everything that I could see felt like my own providence. Something in the back of my mind piqued up to remind me that she was in a vulnerable state and should not be manipulated.
“Do you live with her?” Out of all the questions available, this one seemed to me the least invasive.
“Yeah, we share an apartment…” She paused as she clenched her eyes and mouth, as if a sudden citric taste had brushed her tongue. “Shared, maybe, after tonight…”
My fingers gripped into the rubber of the steering wheel, trembling with intensity as I gritted my teeth to resist asking the obvious next question. I wanted to inquire, desperately, but some wiggling maggot in the back of my mind insisted that I maintain some pretense of etiquette. I cannot really say which of these thoughts were really mine, or perhaps they both were my natural inclinations, yet respectively amplified as soon as I entertained them. I knew I was acting completely unhinged, but something about the atmosphere only allowed for overcorrection. Luckily for my prying side, she kept on without my prompting.
“Two months ago she asked me to come out to my parents,” She sputtered out, now determined to express her woes, “she wanted me to tell them we were getting married and to invite them to the wedding. I was not honest to her about the kind of people they are. I told her I had asked them and they wanted to come, but they were unable ‘cause of a recent death in the family. She offered to reschedule, since she assumed that this would affect me too. I was stupid about it. I am stupid. She was already suspicious, but she figured it all out when she picked up the phone one day and my mom asked if she was my ‘roommate.’ Heh. I don’t know why I didn’t just tell them, maybe to avoid ruining our relationship? God, I am fucking stupid, aren’t I? I want to be loved by everyone. I’m so fucking conceited. I betrayed the only woman who could love a shithead like me. I… I don’t deserve to fucking know her. I’m dirt. I’m putrefying shit. I should fling myself onto the highway. Would my parents come down here to identify me? No, Judy would. She would. She still loves me, but I hurt her. But I fucked her. But I made her a fool. I would do anything for her. I just. I just want to be with her. I don’t care. I don’t care anymore. I need her.”
She was crying for keeps now, her features unfolding like an accordion as the hot, stinging tears flooded the pathways of her face and snot lazily bobbed from her flared nostrils. I saw in the rearview mirror the shame and naked indignation as she tried over and over to wipe it all away. Her cheeks were flushed a cherry red as she kept her own breath over and over, almost resembling a rhythm with the occasional off beat. The image appeared in my head of that detestable CPR dummy, a mere suggestion of human suffering that paled in both pallor and distress to the real thing. I wanted to project myself into the seat beside her, to offer my shoulder to cry on and offer some kind of comfort, but all she had was the loosely concealed metal carriage trapping her. I was too distracted to notice the car which stood completely still in the middle of the highway, perpendicular to both lanes, an unblemished monument without a single soul for miles to claim it. I swerved into the shoulder a mere five yards before I would have hit it straight on, and I should have crashed into the barrier, if not straight over the side of the road, had my car not come to sudden standstill. I had pressed hard on the brakes when I saw the invidious obstacle, but intuitively I knew that I would not have been able to stop in time before I smashed into it. Not only did the car stop, the engine shut off as well and all the lights in the car were extinguished for almost a full minute before springing back to life as if I had only just now turned the key. At the time I knew it was strange, but I didn’t have much room to process it, considering the aftermath of our unsustained momentum.
I had felt myself slam into the seatbelt slashed across my breasts, knocking the air from my lungs as I fish gaped for the entirety of the car’s brief coma. There, sitting in the pitch black night, my respiration on pause, A thought crept over my mind that I was dead and that this strange, darkening limbo were my last few conscious thoughts as my brain went haywire. Alongside came the image of my body flung onto the pavement, miraculously pristine in a wispy white dress spattered with blood along the hem. Like the mysterious vehicle sans motorist, I lay completely alone on the highway, the only other life in all directions being a delicate lily I hold to my chest. Beneath me is the chalk outline meant to mark the site of a body when it has to be moved, but I am firm, immobile, and impenetrable against any physical instrument. When the light and my ability to breath returned, though, I was fully aware of the situation around me, adrenaline pumping through my veins as each of my senses returned to me one-by-one. I began coughing as I filled my bereft lungs far too quickly, which hurt my chest that, at that moment, was developing a nasty, purple bruise that luckily did not indicate any broken ribs. I could hear my passenger undergoing the same process, hacking and sputtering like a half-dead lawn mower. I looked at her and thought she seemed better off than I was, despite her nose slowly dribbling blood onto the hairy backside of the car’s floor mat. There was also a bizarre, sweet smell in the dry air, which first brought to mind the idea of white chocolate, were its saccharin taste ratcheted up by a magnitude of ten. I rolled down my own window a few inches.
“Are you okay?” I said, “is your nose broken? Do you want me to take you to the hospital?”
“No, please, it’s okay,” she insisted, “just… can you get me something to wipe this up?”
“Y-yeah…” I stammered, flummoxed as the blood leaked faster and faster, “Yeah, I think there’s a gas station at the next exit!”
The exit wasn’t far, just outside a small farming town called Blake that most people never stop in for long. The Shell station stood alone like a cowpat in the middle of a barren field, buzzing like one of its own half drunk flies against the manifest backdrop of night. Pulling up to one of the pumps, I considered a high school retreat I took in the summer of my junior year. It was a hot and sticky July and I was forced to sleep in a bunk with a bevy of teenage males who I only barely knew to begin with. Needless to say, I was uncomfortable. Moreover, I was far too reluctant to expose my repulsive form in the open showers and wouldn’t take the risk of trying to sneak one in when everyone else was off playing volleyball or swimming in the lake. I smelled like a flea-bitten ox, and it sticks out to me just how alien I felt in my body, dripping and snorting and stained with fluids that I could only distantly accept were my own byproduct. Still, not all of that trip was so bitter and miserable, there were a few scant moments of karaoke and a teary-eyed confession in the repurposed chapel that added a little sweetness. Regardless, it was one late night at that camp where I came across a vending machine standing beneath a balsa awning, emanating a sound that mimicked tinnitus. It was refrigerated and I had a few dollars on me, so I was determined to have some sugary beverage in the damp, nighttime heat. I slid a five into the conveyor, but it predictably spit it out after it was about halfway in. I had kept it crumbled up in my pocket all day, afterall. Exasperated, I took it out and futilely creased it against the side, like it were some linens I was desperately scraping against a washboard to exhume its bloodstains. Unknowingly, this action stirred up a ghastly little beelzebub.
Perhaps the fattest insect I ever saw, the horse fly floated lazily about until it set down on the side of my cheek. Had there been a reflection from the vending machine's fogged glass case, it would no doubt have resembled a bulbous, cancerous mole, somehow grafted onto my face by a mad dermatologist. I felt something horrible and fuzzy against my skin, as if it were a clot of hair that sprouted wings and escaped from the shower drain in order to haunt me. I yelped, a short shrill thing that invoked the scared, small girl hidden within my dour and bulky edifice. Jumping back from the machine, I had dropped my dollar. For a few seconds, I waited there, observing the grotesqueness of the thing as it bobbed up and down in the air, like a lure designed by an unknown consciousness that could not differentiate human desire from disgust. Every time I reached towards the fiver, the fiend would float down to my arm and scare me back. What had I actually been afraid of? Did I believe that it was an otherworldly lure sent down from the heavens to grab me and pull me into the voracious night? I still can’t say, but it’s clear that I looked like a shivering, fragile mess by the time the fly lost its interest and I could retrieve the stupid bill.
Why did that strangely poignant episode from my youth suddenly spring to mind? Perhaps something about the burning fluorescents of the station and the humid early morning lit up my sense memory, or I felt particularly vulnerable from the change in atmosphere as I had rolled up the window and locked my door behind me. Much like the highway, the landscape was completely bare of any other people or cars, and I entertained a passing thought that perhaps my passenger and I were the last human beings on earth. I might have even preferred that. I held my purse close and listened to the tinny ding of the bell when I pried open the glass door. The cashier was looking up at me from behind a yellowing copy of Split Infinity, his bored, half-lidded eyes sizing me up as I approached him. It hit me not five feet away, much like the stop, that I was a woman, apparently alone, in an unknown and secluded area, in the middle of the night, with no witnesses for miles. This man in front of me was nothing like the fly that I had just dimly recalled, at least not in appearance: the fly was corpulent, this man was gangly; the fly was mobile, this man was still; the fly was coated with hair, this man’s hair was close cropped. However, the two evoked the same kind of disgust and terror within me, only the man made it seem far more rational. My passenger slipped from my mind, leaving us the only two people within the sieve of reality.
“You, um,” I stumbled, “you got any napkins?”
“Yeah,” He spoke curtly, his tone flat and apparently disinterested.
He took one of his overextended arms and stuck it beneath the counter, feeling around for something that I could not see. I breathed in and out through my nose, which whistled from being stuffed up. Struggling to swallow, I suddenly, desperately wished that I had practiced with my voice first back in the car. He brought his long fingers back with a thick stack of beige napkins clamped hard between his thumb and forefinger.
“This enough? “ He drawled, his voice low enough to suggest a snarl.
“Mhm, yeah, that should be fine.” I spun around on the heel of my tennis shoe and took one step before I heard a sharp grunt.
“Needin’ some gas, ma’am?” He spat out. “Not many folks come around here, lest they’re on some big trip.”
“Okay,” I turned back towards him, now recognizing that I had not stopped for gas since setting off.
I reached into my purse and retrieved two twenties which I then held out to him. His tight claw came forward and his thumb rubbed against mine as he took my payment. The feel of his cold skin briefly brushing mine caused a prickling to run up my spine as I replaced my hands behind my back.
“Which pump you on?” He asked, turning his eyes to the window.
“Um… ten” I spoke, joining his gaze to my car, which seemed to strangely shine against the blanket of night.
“Got you a boyfriend?” He asked, typing onto the monitor behind his register.
“What? No” I said, my cheeks hot and my mind too overwhelmed to make the superior decision to lie.
“Ain’t found Mr. Right yet, huh?” He snorted with bemusement. “That’s alright, I haven’t much interest in settling down yet myself. My dad thinks I should, doesn’t want me to work at his gas station all my life, says a girl would really sober me up. I’m playing the field, though. You’d be shocked, the girls I can pick up at a place like this. Maybe they’re shocked to see a man out here who practices basic fucking hygiene, or maybe I just have some je ne sais quois that they can pick up on it. You think so? Do I have some quality you just can’t name? You can tell me, I don’t bite.”
It wasn’t biting that I was worried about. A bite meant quick, sharp pain that could easily be drowned out by the endorphins it elicits. The threat that this man suggested was much more drawn out, a kind of putrid rot that would infect my entire being until all I could see poking out from the pores of my own skin were his plump, mocking eyes staring back at me. He certainly did have a je ne sais quois about him, just as that fly had, both of them seemed to resemble a lure into the heart of madness itself. The closer either of them came to touching me, the closer I came to fully cracking open and spilling my insides out onto the floor.
“Hehe, well, you’re certainly something,” I said, doing my best to keep from vomiting. “I’m just gonna go pump my gas, then.”
“Sure,” he smirked, “make sure you come back for your change.”
I jogged towards the door, glimpsing over my shoulder twice as his smirk only curled further up on his face. I squeezed and creased the napkins in my hand as I opened the door to the far more comforting darkness.
“Have a nice drive, darling,” he purred, “can’t ever be too careful with a pretty face like yours.”
My heart rumbled incessantly, screaming at me to flee from this place as fast as my engine could take me. I cannot say, had I known then what I know now, that my heart was necessarily wrong, but feet had kept at a steady trot nonetheless. I had just grasped the handle with my free hand when I heard the door’s vacuum seal break and the bells jingle again.
“Hey!” I heard him shout at me, “there’s something in your car!”
No no no no, I was not going to allow him another shot at me. This nightmare had to end, regardless of how much I needed the gas. I gripped the handle with a force that could have wrenched the entire door from its frame before jumping in and immediately locking the door behind me. My grip on the napkins had been lost throughout the confusion, some landing on the ground, some on the floor of the car, some jammed in the door itself. I had barely managed to turn my head to the window before he reached the door and began pounding on it, causing the car to rattle and tremble.
“Get out!” He bellowed, “get out of the damn car!”
I stuck my key into the ignition and turned it, hearing it roar into life with its comforting fury. Yanking the lever into reverse, I felt my body jostle up as I ran over one of his feet, and I swear to God I heard a satisfying crunch. He let out a high yelp like an injured dog, so I took the opportunity to peel out from the gas station and straight onto the off ramp, running two red lights on the way there. Reaching the empty highway again, I would not allow myself to drop below seventy-seven miles per hour. Hysterically, I giggled from recalling the plot of the movie Speed, wondering if I would have to ramp a gap over the overpass in order to keep from exploding. No, Dennis Hopper was not going to get the better of me, and I didn’t need a short-cropped Keanu Reeves to keep me going. My tank was fucking full! I kept giggling and giggling as I drove. It felt like hundreds and hundreds of bubbles were rising up within me and popping to release a sweet scented spray of joy. The road was no longer pristine, there were occasional lumps and bumps in the lanes which I swerved to avoid, appearing to be brown sacks when my headlights passed over them. That felt… wrong, and for the first time since leaving the gas station, I realized that I was alone.
“Hey,” I called out, “You okay back there? I hope that creep didn’t spook you.”
It was no surprise when I looked into the back seat and saw no one, but the confirmation shot my nerves with panic. My first conclusion was that she had exited the car to use the bathroom while I was inside. It made sense, I had probably been taking too long getting the napkins and she felt guilty about staining my car, so she went into the bathroom to get some paper towels and wash herself off. Unwittingly, I had left her all along with that freak of a cashier. My blood could not decide to boil or freeze, to curdle or rush, to frolic in righteous indignation or shrink into itself. I had enough wherewithal, though, to pull over to the dirt roadside to have a complete examination of the situation. Once again, my rational side was able to take control and force my eclectic brain into taking full account before I could rush into a reckless decision. Why did it fail, then, at the very start of this journey? These terrible circumstances could have all been avoided.
I took a handheld flashlight out of the console and shined it behind my seat. Where my passenger had been was now just her deflated mossy sundress draped over the side. Her shoes and satchell and old cardigan were all in a messy pile on the car floor, some of her belongings overturned and likely slid into unreachable places. This discovery was only raising further questions, drawing up an obscene image of her streaking through the nightscape as ribbons of clotted crimson hung from her inflamed nostrils. Shaking the image from my head, I was stricken by something else entirely: the car was completely devoid of any bloodstains. I shuffled through them and examined them as closely as I could in the dark, but the floor, her seat, even her own dress were all pristine against the harsh rays of the flashlight. I conjured up some flimsy excuse for this, recalling the time I had been hit with a nose bleed on the bus ride home from school and that girl in front of me had offered a tampon to plug up my nose. Yet, even if she had improvised such a solution, that did not explain the stains that should have already formed; not unless she had been inexplicably toting around a container of club soda.
It was undeniable that something uncanny had taken place, something that could not be so easily explained by tampons or a perverted gas station attendant. My brain raced through a million scenarios, none of which seemed plausible or a feasible explanation for every distinct detail of this bizarre happening. Had I somehow hallucinated the hitchhiker entirely? No, because if I had, then her clothes and waller would not physically remain in the car. Had she somehow faked the nosebleed before wandering off in her birthday suit? Unlikely, considering the fact that I had seen her bleeding myself. Had aliens abducted her and hoovered up all of her biological material while I was in the gas station? Could be, or maybe she was spontaneously raptured, both seemed equally plausible. What the hell was I going to tell her fiance? “Sorry, your girlfriend disintegrated in the back of my car, my condolences.” Was it actually possible for me to explain this to her without her drawing the inevitable conclusion that I had killed her?
I wished to God or whatever entity could hear me that I had never picked her up in the first place, that she had never had that fight with her lover, completely unaware that it would be the last time she would speak to her. Desperate for any kind of answer, I reached into her satchel and found her wallet, a thin white billfold that displayed her ID through translucent plastic. I held my free palm up to my mouth and my breath caught in my throat, another enigmatic realization mounting. The woman’s name was Melony, just like my great aunt. My brain short circuited to the idea that somehow the car had summoned her here as a ghost, but that did not add up either. Her license clearly stated she had been the same age as me, that she had a distinct surname, and both in my memory and her picture she was clearly a woman of color. Still, my mind could not shake the mental association between these improbable coincidences.
I felt a rising sense of dread manifesting towards my vehicle. The air inside felt thick and humid, causing fat droplets of sweat to lazily fork down my cheeks as fog crept over my glasses. I cranked the A/C to max, but the only air circulating in the steel sepulcher was stale. In the back of my throat, I could taste something rough, a gritty imitation of copper. The smell of lilies had slowly transitioned into something equally sweet, but the rotten, unearthly stench could only call to mind that of a Titum arum, a corpse flower. Another stray thought struck me, and this one was as poignant as the smell: the only cure for this sickness is to drive and drive as fast as possible.
Before that urge would have completely subsumed me, I threw the door open and vomited right on the grass outside. The taste of used coffee and bile managed to drown out that metallic flavor, and the uncharacteristically cold night air nearly froze the beads of sweat still stuck to my forehead. Wait, hadn’t it been a warm night earlier on? When did everything outside the car drop 50 degrees? What the hell was going on? The searing lights of high beams then washed over me as a Dodge pickup screeched to a halt behind my… that car. I heard the cab pop open, and it had taken me a few seconds to recognize this interloper.
“Hey miss!” The man shouted, the ghoul of the pump. “Get the fuck away from that car!”
No, that should not have been possible, I had been speeding for miles and miles since the gas station, and I had not seen this truck anywhere within the radius of it. Even if he had somehow hidden it behind a corner with a tarp and had no trouble getting into it with his injured foot, I should’ve somehow seen him in the rear view if he had been this close behind me. None of this made any sense, and each new contradictory piece of information only made my sanity unravel further. He was limping, so that aspect of my getaway must have been real, and I suspected that the revolver he was holding was also quite real. Even if I had been possessed of my full wits, I doubt that I could get my full body back in before he could get a shot off. I kept my right hand on my knee to steady myself and raised my left hand up in surrender.
“Seriously, girl,” He growled, “that thing ain’t natural.”
I saw his thumb make a quick flicking motion, most likely disengaging the safety. A morbid voice said to me: “at least if he kills me now, I won’t be around when he finds out I have a penis.” Of course, he was not wrong about the car, but I doubt this was leading anywhere pleasant even if he managed to slay the mechanical beast. He yanked my sinister hand and brought me to my feet next to him. The smell of his unwashed jumpsuit and nicotine dip seemed almost quaint after the most recent assault on my senses. His off hand kept a constant bead on the car, and it was clear that this man was unfamiliar with the concept of trigger discipline. I could feel his clenched fingers punching into my skin, certain to leave another nasty bruise.
“Something’s wrong,” he proclaimed, “this thing ain’t a car.”
“What?” I gasped, barely audible.
“I saw it eat her,” he said, nonchalantly, “she was all twisted up and covered in this red mist. The back of your car had a bunch of these weird little nipples, kinda looked like barnacles the size of golf balls. How the fuck didn’t you see those?”
At the time, I can’t say I was really processing his words, he definitely seemed to me the most immediate threat. For all I knew, we were both hallucinating, and his testimony certainly was not more trustworthy than mine. I had no clue what would happen to him as he opened the back door and checked inside, but I summoned up my strength to push him in and hoped to God he was right.
“What the hell, bitch?!” He shouted, “Are you out of your goddamn mind?”
It was honestly a wonder that I could still stand, but I had managed to knock him over and get him to drop the gun. Since he had already been leaning in a bit, his face fell straight onto Melony’s dress and his feet were still hanging out the door. In order to swivel around, he pulled his knees beneath him, thus smushing his injured foot.
“Fuck!” He yelped.
Compelled, I locked the door and slammed it behind him, trapping him in his own little rolling tomb, then bracing it with my own body. It did not occur to me that he could simply get out through the other side, but it was ultimately already too late for that to make any difference. Peaking within, I watched the upholstery expand and contract around him, as if it were an air mattress being pumped up and down again, air moving through it slowly and deliberately. Faint red and blue veins spread across its lung flesh, zigzagging across every available surface that now appeared to be a single, flexible texture. One-by-one, pin holes gaped open on the seats, the floor, the ceiling, all radiating out from the interloper’s body, which was now turned toward me. He looked like a fresh caught carp, repeatedly opening and closing his mouth as the air burned him up from the inside out. The pores gaped further, rhythmically sucking and blowing to circulate the air ( whatever translucent gas was approximating it), their fishy “lips” folding in and out in unison. It looked like the world’s most bizarre air hockey table, and that poor bastard was the puck. Those under skin and clothes continuously sucked on him like a hungry infant nursing from their mother.
“It hurts!” He choked, “Oh sweet Jesus, let me out, it’s swallowing me!”
An electric signal flowed into me, involuntarily causing me to duck and narrowly avoid a bullet that busted through the door right where my head had been. Somehow, the man had regained ownership of his gun, and he was sure that it could somehow rescue him. The high pitched whine of a tea kettle came from the now whistling orifice in the window, sucking and blowing air just as the little pores had. Then I saw the hole fester and, for lack of any more accurate term, scab over. The thin, fibrous “glass” slowly pulsed as its wound mended and closed before my eyes. Right then was the last chance I had to run and never looked back at the inhuman feast taking place inside the thing. Maybe I could have hotwired the man’s truck or even taken my chances with hitchhiking, either might have been at least enough to save me. However, while I heard my rational self loud and clear, it was nowhere near strong enough to beat out my own grotesque curiosity. Looking back inside, I could now see the red mist that he had mentioned, most resembling a thick crimson chalk dust that puffs up when you clap chalkboard erasers together. This dust was emanating from his injured foot.
The man was sweating as if he had just run a marathon across the entire circumference of the equator, each bead immediately slurped up by one of the little mouths. He was emaciated and his eyes were upturned, stuck in what I suspected was a state of still conscious rigor mortis as his mouth formed a hollow screech. He was like the profaned child of American Gothic and The Scream. His clothes and skin so tight that they were fused together, arduously shrink wrapping his bone and tendons, akin to a vacuum bag sucking onto a steak. More than disgust, more than fear, I felt a deep and instinctual satisfaction. I was a cat watching a little mouse squirm and flail his limbs as I held him up by the tail, too stupid to realize that his pitiful life was already finished. I am sure that this was exactly the kind of fate this man deserves, and looking back, my only regret is that Melony had to endure any such suffering comparable to him.
His body was already devoid of all its succulent blood, and I stared at his elongated and mummified face as it desperately tried to pull in the air that could no longer oxygenate his decrepit corpse. The rest of his evil form shriveled up into his work clothes as even his bones became part of the atmosphere, forming a pastel pink mist that swiftly disappeared into the flesh of the vehicle. Somewhere along the way, either in watching or simply touching the car as it completed its feeding, that sense of intoxication from earlier in the night had returned to me. I threw the door open and took a long whiff of what imperceptible mist remained. The coppery taste returned, but more rich and spicy than I could appreciate before.
That’s when Charlotte finally opened herself up to me, no longer keeping up any pretense that she was a simple motor vehicle. Now, this is probably fairly confusing to imagine, and I apologize for that, but you really have to see it to know what I mean. When I say that she “opened herself up to me,” I don’t mean that she climbed out of the engine block or that the front of the car suddenly formed a big mouth under her headlights that began expositing things to me. No, I mean that she unfolded herself. Flesh and metal and plastic fusing and unfusing, twirling and curling together, forming six large petals with an intricate series of interlacing spirals along each that became an unfamiliar language. Four tendrils poked from between the petals and tenderly slid along my body, coating me in a strange film that opened my pores and awakened all my senses to a greater magnitude than I can describe. She was a lily, she was Charlotte, she was a car, and she was something much greater that I still, despite everything, can only barely perceive. In the center of her mass was the lost picture, a beautiful visage of a woman who had to be younger than the one my aunt had described, yet the date at the bottom was June 2009. Behind her was the car, old and rusted and broken, something that should have been beyond repair. They were the same, they had always been the same, and now I am the same as well.
I cannot really say how long I have been driving, running down an endless highway with no exits as the wind ripples through my fur, but the night has yet to turn into dawn. I suspect that I’ll be able to return to the original highway once I’ve finished writing this all out. I know that I am taking my sweet time, just sitting at my desk all night long, reading and typing and deleting as I gradually roll closer and closer to the end. Oh, but you see, I should really clarify a bit. I am driving on the highway, but I am also in my room at the same time, but I am the car, and the room, and the panther, and the desk, and the highway. I am Charlotte and I am Christine. Yes, Christine, I get the irony of that, that’s why I did not mention my name when I began. It’s kind of amusing to read a book when you are the book, and I’m not totally sure if all the words are accurate to the actual text or just jumbled together from my own approximations. Maybe I should ask my girlfriend to get a copy of Paradise Lost from the library and to read it to me so that I can check the similarities. That is, of course, assuming that I will be emerging as the car, I could just as easily pop onto the highway as an office chair or a laptop or as my own human form. I might be thinking about this wrong, though, it’s just all so new to me and I am getting a bit too stream of consciousness right now.
The highway is littered with more and more lumps, alongside patches of grass and bits and pieces of other cars. When I look at the lumps, my eyes shine on them and reveal a rotting animal carcass that’s been spread out like a glob of jam on the tar. Sometimes it is just normal roadkill, I think? Other times, I see that they have the mangled faces of the people who have been inside me, still somehow alive and belching out pained cries of desperation. When it is the man from the gas station, I will sometimes go out of my way to run him over, to hear the delicious squelch as he pops beneath my tires. When it’s Melony, though, I have to turn away. I want to find a way to bring her back, to reconstitute her and allow her to live the life she deserves with the woman she loves. It should be possible. I believe I have seen her silhouette, standing at the end of the hallway that lies beyond my secluded room, and I think that these very words might somehow turn into the key I need to reach her. If you are reading this, then I would have had to return through some means or another, which hopefully means that Melony is back too. That, or you have become me, in which case I sincerely apologize for the terrible mess we have made for ourselves. Regardless, these will be the final words I produce on the matter, ‘cause I have been running on fumes for quite a while.