Until I Land
By Tommy Dean
Adam cruises the passenger side tire over the sidewalk as I come running out the front door, my mother grabbing for me, dressed in light like a storefront mannequin. Easy to ignore except for her shrieks. Ungrateful bitch lands hard like a water balloon in the middle of my back, its poison spreading over my body, as I jump in the car. Adam hits the gas, my head pushed back into the seat, hair already trying to fly away out the open window. A piece of me trying to get back into the house, so mother can hold like an antique bell. Collected but never rung.
10:59 and we’re in his car, bass rattling the trunk and my chest, my heart a metronome making up for lost time. Everything in me too young to stop, throttling into a darkened future.
“Let’s fly,” I say, a couple of percs in my palm, sweating around the truncated love line. A bottle of cheap vodka, liquid clear, purification as I swallow. I imagine the pills like lonely ships swirling around in my stomach, words I didn’t get to say bubbling in the acid.
“What she do this time?” he says, his hand palming my knee like a bowling ball he can’t wait to finger, to roll down the slick alley, to knock me down, claim a score.
“Oh, the things I could tell you. Boy, she hates you. She’s got a lot to say about that.” City lights wave in the rearview, and I turn around, watching as long as I can. The tires stutter over bumps, as Adam weaves us through the country roads, planted decades ago, following the river. No imaginations then, and I hate them for their conformity, their willingness to stake claim.
The last time we saw my dad the bees had us trapped behind our front door. We snapped pictures and uploaded them to search engines, and we couldn't agree on whether they were common wood bees that posed no immediate harm or if they were something worse, something aggressive and deadly, and unnamed. I hated the undefined. The danger that lies in the unknown. The risk of some anomaly injuring us, creating a disease in our supple bones, our blood triggered into attack and self-defense. I stood behind my father, his large stature a natural shield. His actions amongst the natural world had a kind of earmarked, but invisible karma that had to be repaid to keep the Earth spinning. Sins of the father, my mother reminded him. Our actions, we each begged, were microtransactions, multitudes none of us could keep track of, couldn't balance, and so we argued about who to send out first, blame slickening our tongues and sliding out of our lips until secrets and jealousies were named until my father gave in the buzz of each wing a chorus of complaints guiding him to his Bronco and onto the streets leading him away from our particular disappointments.
“We gotta go to the cemetery. Right? I remembered the blanket this time.” He smiles as if he’s created something new. A genius in his Chevy Cavalier. Forest green. Four cylinders. Gas efficient. Totally lackluster, but when you’re escaping you don’t get to pick your horse.
“She probably thinks we’re fucking anyway. I told her some things. Made her blush.”
The rap music comes to a halting stop, the voice cutting in and out, the cd skipping. His hand coming off my knee, but I grab it and hold it against my stomach. Daring him to feel the difference, the sound something caught, bouncing from speaker to speaker, and I say, “Babe.”
He looks away from the road, his eyes marbled moons I’d love to pluck out and carry around in my purse. “This is me,” I say. The car swerving out and back into our lane, the beam of another animal’s eyes scurrying deeper into the forest and I conjure that poison out the window, and wish the thing my very worst.
Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He is the Editor of Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. His writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019, 2020, 2023, Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2022, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.