Broad Sound

The reception’s gotten fuzzy

I’m dreaming about you the way I have all summer, the way a thirsty man dreams about water, the way a drowning man dreams about solid ground. I didn’t know what a firm foundation felt like before I drifted into town and found you. Maybe there hasn’t been much of a foundation here, either, but it’s the best I’ve known in a while now.

It had been a long day when I first met you; I hadn’t gotten as far as I’d wanted to before my piece-of-shit car decided to throw a tantrum. I limped into town, looking for a mechanic, and instead of finding someone to fix my car I found someone who broke me apart. You’d been smoking a cigarette behind the gas station, bored out of your mind on your 15-minute break, and when I saw you with your mane of curly hair glowing red in the sunlight I thought, I want you.

I don’t know if the feeling will last much longer. I don’t know that I can trust that you’ve ever felt that way about me. You rose to meet my intensity, but you never initiated it the way I did. You just turned to face me, tapped the ash off your cigarette, and with that one forceful tap you took me prisoner. I didn’t care about getting out of town anymore. I just knew I wanted to be wherever you were.

You’ve never been fully here, either. You’ve always wanted to leave. Maybe my arrival was the splash of novelty that you needed, but it’s been almost two months now, and the sharp intensity of finding someone new has faded to the low dull ache of settling in for what I hope is the long haul. Long hauls have always been hard for me. I keep breaking down at inopportune moments, which is how we got thrown together in the first place. You seem ambivalent either way, which scares me almost more than my worst nightmares, where I find out you’ve never cared about me. Anyway, the summer’s wearing on, and the bored tap of your finger on the cigarette has gotten more forceful. You’ve been saving money. Maybe now’s our chance to get out of here.

I can feel autumn in the other room, not that it ever feels like autumn this far south. It’s the principle of the thing, the signals we feel compelled to put up. Red silk-leaf garlands in the diner window, the jack o’lanterns grinning in the seasonal aisle at Wal-Mart next to the plastic skeletons. Everything dies sooner or later if you let it. So I won’t let it. I’ll just hold on even tighter.

—

Now you say you love me

I’m sitting in the shade of my car in the parking lot, quietly sweating. The repairs I needed to make on the car wiped out most of my gas money, so now I guess I’m stuck here the same way you are. Maybe it isn’t the exact same, though. The car works at least, although the air conditioning is unreliable. It won’t get us out of here in comfort. Whenever you’re around, I don’t care about the miles of desert separating us from the rest of the world. The rest of the world doesn’t matter all that much out here anyway. Not when I’m with you.

You appear almost as though I’d conjured you out of thin air, a mirage out of the sunlight, your hair piled high on top of your head to keep it from sticking to the sweat at the nape of your neck. It seems like an inconvenience, but you won’t cut it off, either, and I love you for that almost more than I love you for everything else that you do.

You drop your backpack and slide down the side of the car to sit next to me in the dust. You’re wearing a pair of faded denim cutoffs, like me—neither of us ever grew out of wearing band tees and jeans, though we probably should have a long time ago. Your t-shirt sleeves are the same hard blue as the morning sky, rolled up on top of your freckled shoulders. You light a cigarette and then throw your head back to rest against the side of the car, exhaling a stream as you brace for the day ahead.

“Dale?” I ask.

“Dale,” you say back, and take another drag.

Dale is the day manager at the gas station where you work, the guy you’d been hiding from when I’d met you on your smoke break. He’s not a bad guy, exactly, he’s just a hardass about rules and a stickler for time. His reminders to do all the things you need to do when running a convenience store tend to wear on a person pretty quickly. It makes me think of the rocks eroding away in the wind, somewhere out there in the desert, the sand and dust blasting at their surfaces and leaving behind long pitted grooves. Someone told me once that the time it takes to make those shapes in the rocks out there is what makes them so valuable, that after long years they’ll be worn smooth, but I’m not interested in any of that. The time and the pain sound like a hell I want no part of. I’ve got a groove of irritation that wears deeper every time I have to go through the door to that store, hear the bell chirp, and hear Dale say a too-cheery “Hello!” at me when I walk in. I think your groove is longer and smoother than mine, that you’ve got a tolerance built up to stave off the annoyance. But I know you’re also saving up to get out of town.

You turn to me after a couple of beats, the smoke hanging around your head. “What are you up to today?” you ask as you pass me the cigarette.

“Trying to beat the heat,” I say. I take a drag too, a little too quickly; I’ve picked up this habit from you.

“Doesn’t look like it’s working much,” you say, taking it back.

“It’s because I’m hot for you,” I say, and immediately regret it. What a stupid line. No wonder you’re going to leave me. Not that you’ve said anything, but I just know it. This can’t last forever. I’ll be a tumbleweed again, looking for another purpose in another town, blown away by you. And you? You won’t even care. You’ll just go on being the sun.

A thousand years pass in the next second. But instead of leaving me, you laugh. It’s a warm laugh, and I made you do it. I’ll live to do it again. “It’s too hot to do much of anything,” you say, “but come over here anyway,” and you stub out your cigarette in the dirt and you lean in my direction and then I’m drowning in you.

—

Kiss me with your mouth open

The doorbell chimes, cheery and fake, as we walk into the gas station hand in hand. My car’s out front, having just drunk away the last of my gas money. I don’t know why I topped it off this time; usually I fill it just enough that I know I can get through another week. I guess I’m feeling decadent today. It must come with the cloudless skies and with the knowledge that we aren’t over, at least not yet.

Dale looks up from the clipboard on the counter when we walk in. “Hello!” he says, and I hate him a little more than I had before we’d walked in the door.

“Hi, Dale,” you say, and you go to stash your bag in the breakroom.

“Don’t forget to clock in,” Dale says as you slip past him.

“Sure thing,” you say, your voice neutral.

He watches you as you walk by, and I bristle. The look isn’t hostile, not exactly, but it is possessive, lingering just a half-second too long on your ass. He looks back at me, sees me watching, and grins. He doesn’t need to say anything; I already know what’s crossed his mind, and I don’t like it.

Two things happen simultaneously: you return from the breakroom, and I realize that the key to getting out has been here this whole time.

I turn to you and grin. “Watch this,” I say, and then I pull the gun out of my backpack and I point it directly at Dale.

—

You just can’t do things your body wasn’t meant to

The car is juddering as we speed out of town. I want to whoop, but I feel like crying. My hands are tight on the steering wheel so that they don’t shake. I’ve pushed the gas pedal almost to the floor, and the car shakes as I yank it onto the highway, a straight shot out of here. No more town, no more gas station, no more Dale, just the contents of the cash register and us and the road. Your breathing is sharp, as if you’re crying, although I don’t think I’ve ever heard you cry before. I reach out my hand, afraid to take my eyes off the road, and you grab it, your fingers wet and sticky, and it’s then that I look over and see all the blood.

Oh, God. There’s so much blood. It’s dark, glistening against the sky blue of your shirt, and you’re shaking.

“No, no, no,” I say, and I start digging, one-handed, in my backpack for something to stem the bleeding. A t-shirt will have to do. I push it into your ribs and you yelp, but you grab the cloth and push it into your side a little tighter.

“Is it bad?” I ask, panic rising in my voice.

You shake your head, peeling back your own shirt to take a look. “It hurts, but I think you just grazed it. It’s just bleeding a lot.”

I’m panicking now. “We should get you to a doctor. I’m going to turn around, we’ll go back, we’ll fix this—”

“No,” you say. “We’re going. Keep going.”

If we live to see the other side of this

The silence has turned grim now. When we left town, it had been expectant, the open road unfolding under a diamond-hard sun as we burned rubber. That was hours ago; this is now. The elastic intensity of hope has wound itself into a coil so tight that it could break at any moment. I keep checking the rearview mirror, but there’s nothing behind us the same way that there’s nothing ahead, just the bleached-out blacktop beneath our speeding tires and the endless stretch of starlight scattered like broken glass above.

You’re still bleeding.

Or at least, I think you are. It’s not as bad as it had been, but I can tell you’re uncomfortable. Your breath keeps hitching. I love you so much, and I’ve hurt you, and I can’t let you go because then I’ll never see you again, and you’ll hate me forever if you stay. Stupid, stupid. I should have moved on as soon as the car was fixed. I shouldn’t have dragged you into this with me.

“We have to pull over,” you tell me, and it sounds bad. I check the rearview again—still nothing—and then ease over to the soft shoulder of the road, dirt grumbling under the tires as I bring the car to a halt. It’s so quiet, no light but the stars. The hot air bakes my lungs when I crack open the door and tumble out of the car in my haste to help you.

You’re still sitting bent over in the front passenger seat, your legs swung out the side door to rest on the ground. Before I can say anything to you, you look up at me and say, “I wanted this.”

You were never going to let me go. I was your ticket out of here, a ragged piece of paper that drifted to you on the wind. You set me on fire, and I burned you, and now we’re a part of each other, still starving, but at least we’re not alone anymore.

I fall to my knees and I kiss you, sticky and hot, and you kiss me back with a hungry energy that I couldn’t have thought was possible. You keep surprising me, though. I didn’t think we’d make it this far. Everything dies sooner or later if you let it, but I’ll be damned if I let it. We break free of each other for breath, and the hot dry air feels light somehow. I look over your shoulder. Somewhere in the distance, back the way we came, I think I can see blue sparks.