Page 17 - Vol. VII #1

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The man from the boat stored a rusting Chevy Ca- maro on shore with a buddy. The car at first didn’t start at all until it spit some fumes with a hack and
all seemed well. Lidia started to climb in the back with Marion, but the man waived her to the front and Lidia, freezing for a moment with one leg already in the car and an arm resting on the roof, withdrew her- self from Marion, her flip flop dangling helplessly on her foot as she retrieved her leg. Marion watched her mother as she lowered herself slowly on the front seat, knees squeezed tightly together, face turned towards the bay.
than the real one, being able to manipulate the imagi- nary mother any way Marion wanted her—healthy, collected, warm-fleshed, strong. Always there. But then Marion shut her eyes and pulled her head away from the window and turned her eyes towards the back of Lidia’s head, glowing in the sunlight, and al- lowed that glow to fill up the spaces of her heart.
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They were halfway to Los Angeles when Lidia started to bleed. Marion heard a small gasp from the direc- tion where her mother sat and saw Lidia lift her body from the seat and look down. Marion squeezed the
They passed brightly colored bodegas selling fish and chips and lemonade, shaggy pine trees and dirty trail- ers with drawn curtains on their small windows. One of the trailer curtains had a pattern of giant, droop- ing poppies in red, yellow, and purple, and Marion thought of how she had never seen a purple poppy and didn’t really want to see one. The metal on the trailer homes were so cloaked with grease and black- ened by oil that the structures looked like perma- nently abandoned, ill-conceived art projects, now at one with the soil and grass they stood on, never to be inhabited or moved.
Strings of light speckled many of the bodegas, their brightness competing with the sun that rendered their existence superfluous, and Marion wondered about the wasting of electricity, the wasting of things. She stretched her arms out, marveling at the gentle golden fluff covering her skin; this too was a waste, the hair on her limbs serving no purpose at all. She rested her head on the window, the glass cool and its metal frame hot, nearly burning her, and she closed her fist around the strap of Lidia’s handbag which she left in the back seat, and made herself imagine that Lidia was next to her, not just in her imagination but really next to her, her hips pressing next to Marion’s and her hair tickling her face in the wind. For a shame- ful moment Marion thought it was almost better that way, having the imaginary mother next to her rather
back of Lidia’s seat and pulled herself forward and looked too, and saw the deep red, almost perfectly round stain in the back of her mother’ skirt.
The man groaned but didn’t say anything, only pulled abruptly into a gas station on Lidia’s side of the road, turning the steering wheel with one sweep of his arm and cutting in front of a car. Lidia didn’t react, her face pale and rigid.
“Get yourself cleaned up. You’ll ruin the seat.”
The man—whose name, Marion learned, was Brian —had sweat gathered under his armpits which now dripped onto his seat like oil from a pan. Marion wanted to kick him, tell him he was ruining his own seat, but she didn’t. Instead, she got out of the car with Lidia and began to follow her to the restroom, until Lidia turned back and shook her head. The
sun by then was high in the sky and was burning Marion’s arms as she stood next to a black Labrador, reluctant to return to the car, uncertain what to do.
The dog drank from a green plastic bowl. Amazing how much noise thirst can make, Marion thought, and how big of a mess, as she watched the dog lapping up the water, splashing the concrete with water and saliva.
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10
WTP Second Place 2019
For Literary