Final Workshop Piece for Short Fiction
Live For This
**Suggested but not required: Listen to Waves by Magic Man until the car stops, and again when it starts driving again;
Techno Fan by the Wombats before reading, and again when mentioned in the text.**
I stuck my head out the window, feeling the relatively cool, August night blow through my hair, whipping it behind me in a tangled tail. The first hints of the crispness of autumn air playfully floated around the car, swirling between the tall, looming trees. Basking in the light of the moon, and the sweet, sultry spirit of summer, we drove down the dirt road at a questionable speed.
As a synth rock anthem, blaring from the speakers, built and crescendoed to the climax of the song, and the resounding bass bounced around in my ribcage, I whooped, looking over at him, both of us laughing. The clear night sky above us was peppered with the pinpricks of stars, though we could only see a strip of them; the edges of our vision obscured by the walls of tall pine trees that lined the road.
Suddenly, he took a sharp left, knocking me out of my reverence of the summer sky, and slightly slamming me into the side of the car, which was terrifying because the passenger side door of the beat up 1990 Volkswagen Golf has a tendency to swing open at random. I cried out at the sudden, jarring, jolting movement and spun around to look at him disdainfully. He shrugged a little in mock guilt, smirking as he did so, one eyebrow raised.
“Ass!” I hissed, resisting the urge to laugh, flicking his ear.
“Sorry.” He always laid the sarcasm on super thick.
“You know,” I jostled the rosary hanging from this rearview mirror. “ lying is a sin.”
He grinned, reaching over in an attempt to mess up my hair.
“Stoppit! I actually straightened it for once! Wait, dude, were we supposed to make that left?” I knew that we had to make a left somewhere, but I thought it was at a four-way intersection, not just a random turn off.
“I’m 99% sure …”
Eyebrows raised, I wasn’t convinced, but I didn’t say anything more and returned to admiring the magical place we’d found ourselves in.
Originally, I hadn’t even wanted to go to this party. Thirty minutes deeper into the abyss of the Adirondacks, away from the familiarity of my grandparents’ quaint, lake house that I went to every summer, to a place that was the epitome of “the middle of nowhere,” seemed a bit excessive, especially because it was BYOB.
But it was his best friend’s, who’d relocated up here to “find himself” after college, first house party, and the last night we’d all be together for the summer before going back to our lives. He’d go back to working for his dad’s accounting firm in Boston, and I’d go to start my new job at a magazine. We’d go back to reality. But this party was, apparently, going to be “the party of our lives,” so he’d insisted, and, eventually, I caved.
Now that I was here, under the canopy of stars and drenched in the spirit of summer time, breathing in the air of the trees and the mountains, with one of my favorite people in the world, I couldn’t imagine spending my evening anywhere else.
Fifteen minutes or so later, we found ourselves at a dead end. The “straight out of a horror movie” kind of dead end; the kind that emanates unavoidable, impending doom, with no way out. No noticeably inhabited houses, no glowing windows, just a dingy rundown cabin, that might have been abandoned years before, or else housed some evil spirit from the beyond, I couldn’t be sure either way. Regardless, there was no legendary party to be found; it wasn’t where we were supposed to be.
At this point, I turned to look at him, again raising my thick eyebrows, prepared for a celebratory “I told you so,” but he was already banging his head lightly on the steering wheel.
I patted him on the shoulder consolingly, chuckling and shaking my head, as I reached into the glove compartment for the directions we’d scribbled on the back of a piece of junk mail. The thing with being in the middle of nowhere, is that cell service isn’t really a thing you can rely on, so Google Maps, or really, any kind of GPS, was out of the question. While I struggled to read his borderline Med-school-bad handwriting, he clambered out of the car, stretching and cursing, pulling slightly at his mess of black hair, clearly frustrated with the situation. I wanted to get out of here, too; the darkness of the forest was starting to cause the monsters from my childhood nightmares to squirm in the pit of my stomach and chest cavity. Giving up on translating the coded scrawl of his handwriting, I decided to join him out there, mostly just to fill my lungs with the richness of the mountain air.
“So…”
“So.” He exhaled. He was a million miles away, but I couldn’t figure out where or why he was there.
“We’re a little lost. It’s not a big deal.” I said, leaning against the driver’s side car door, crossing my arms.
“Oh, I know. I’m not even mad.” He stretched his arms over his head, examining the clouds intently. “Just… thinking.”
“About…?” He was always so vague. Such a smart person, but incapable of sharing what was going on in his noggin. Normally I’d just let it go, and let him talk to me when he was ready. He’s funny like that, a thinker. He told me almost everything, but only after he’d processed it on his own. This usually took a week or two… Usually.
“I haven’t been lost like this since I was a kid.” He looked at the ground now, shuffling his feet. “My mom HATED getting lost. It freaked her out. Like really freaked her out. It was kind of funny, actually. She would get to the point where she would swear and kind of spaz out, as if there was no hope left for anything in the world. The minute she realized we were going the wrong way… oh boy.” He started to laugh a little, “This one time, I was eight or nine, she missed an exit on the thruway, and you’d have thought she was traveling through hyperspace and missed a planet or something. God, you should have seen her, this proper Catholic woman cursing like a sailor.”
I stood in awe. This was new, unexpected. We’d been friends for a while, good friends, but I’d never heard him talk about his mom like this, or at all, really.
I knew he didn’t have a great relationship with her. I knew she’d been put away for embezzling from the accounting firm that both she and his father owned our Junior year of high school. I knew she hadn’t been the best moral role model for him. I knew she made a lot of mistakes, some unforgivable. I knew very little because I knew not to ask.
What I knew about her, I knew from the news, or overhearing and my parents talk about it. He’d mentioned her occasionally, but never enough for me to really understand who she was. He’d only ever talked to me about her once; the night she’d been arrested.
His dad dropped him at my house at 2 am, because he refused to interact with anyone else, even though we’d only been friends for a year, maybe less. He didn’t say much, he just cried quietly into my shoulder for an hour or so until he finally spoke, asking if we could watch the Princess Bride and eat saltines. So we did. Only after we’d finished the movie, and three and half sleeves of crackers, was he ready to tell me what he could.
He didn’t completely understand what she’d done legally wrong, but she’d stolen a lot of money from the firm she and his father were partners in; she had an accomplice in it as well, a man with whom she was having an affair. Ironically, he wound up being the one who turned her in, and to top it off the man was our high school Calc teacher.
That was the last time he’d spoken to me or, as far as I know, to anyone at length about his mother. I figured he would tell me when he was ready, but I was totally unprepared for what was happening now. He’d never talked about her like this before, someone that he’d known, and loved and lost.
While I stood, listening intently and staring, his nostalgic laughter subsided into a heavy, sad silence.
Neither of us spoke. Neither of us knew just what to say.
So we didn’t.
After a few minutes of this thick silence, broken only by the snapping of twigs and movement of small animals, which I pretended didn’t terrify me, I cautiously grabbed his hand, interlacing his fingers in mine, rubbing his thumb. He stared off into the darkness of the forest, avoiding making eye contact with me, but he squeezed my hand, letting me know he appreciated the gesture. A tear dripped off the end of his nose.
“It’s funny,” he said, slowly, wiping the tear away with his sleeve, “how easy it is to get lost.”
I nodded in response.
“Just one mistake, and bayum” he whispered “everything’s different and new and scary.”
He watched the dark, empty forest, but I could tell he wasn’t really seeing it. Part of me wanted to know more, to ask what he was thinking about, to dig deeper into his memory and find what he was seeing, but my better judgment took over.
I knew he was done talking about it. I knew he needed to move on, to talk about something different. I needed to remind him of where we were. I tugged on his arm, pulling him to the hood of the car, and sat on it, gesturing for him to do the same. I laid back, one arm behind my head, the other still holding his. He mimicked my actions, so that we were both, once again, staring up at the dancing lights above us, so seemingly solid and immovable.
“Have you ever heard of astronavigation?” I said after what felt like forever.
He shook his head no, not looking away from the natural light show above us.
“Apparently, back in the day, people see where they were in relation to certain stars in the sky, and, depending on where they were oriented, would figure out where they were going, and go from there.”
He furrowed his brow, mulling over what I’d just said.
“It’s just… like weird,” I continued, knowing he was done talking for a while, “how people don’t really acknowledge the stars anymore. It’s just not something people think about. It’s one of the little things that we tend not to remember when we’re going from our day to day. People just forget to look up or can’t see that there’s this crazy, apparently permanent canvas of contrasting darkness with holes of light over our heads every goddamn night.” I was working myself into a nervous, babbling, poetic frenzy “And it’s a map! People just don’t give it a thought!” I threw my free hand up in the air as if to further exemplify my disdain, before letting it fall limp, hitting the hood of the car beneath us with a loud thud.
“People are too busy thinking about other things,” he said after a my rant came to a clear end, “they don’t take the precious minutes it takes to even notice the goodness and beauty in the things right in front of them, let alone things at night.”
I felt his calloused fingers tense in mine, “It’s much more normal for people to just speed through life, being selfish and trying to get ahead, trying to be the best… whatever the cost. No matter who gets hurt– ”
He stopped abruptly, and we both let the sickening silence saturate the space surrounding us.
We both knew that he was still talking about his mom, but neither of us wanted to address it. That’s not what we wanted this night, our last night, to be about.
The forest seemed to acknowledge this moment of solidarity because it, too, suddenly became very still. The silence and his sadness were causing an aching in my bones. I needed to do something. I needed to make him better. Lacking saltines and Princess Bride, I needed to improvise. I hopped off the hood of the car, letting go of his hand, wiggling to pull up my skinny jeans, and climbed into the driver’s seat, and put it the car in auxiliary mode. I fiddled with the cassette player adaptor and iPod for a couple of seconds, and selected a song.
I wanted something with a good beat, with an even better vibe. I turned the wheel on the iPod classic until I found Techno Fan by The Wombats. Perfect.
I cranked up the bass and opened the doors of the car.
I went around to the trunk of the car, again pulling up my pants, and ripped open the thirty rack of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and pulled one out. At this point, he joined me, looking at me inquisitively. I handed him the can.
“I can’t. I have to drive.” He said, looking at me incredulously, knowing I’m not one for condoning drunk driving, or any other excessively reckless endangerment, for that matter.
“Please note: I only pulled one out. I’ll drive.” I started to dance to the music, which was coming to the chorus, opening the beer and holding it out, “Now drink up.”
The singer’s evident English accent radiated through the night as the chorus blared from the speakers, the only part of the car from this decade.
Shut up and move with me, move with me…
I grabbed his free hand and danced around, twirling in some sort of mock swing dance; the kind that would make my uncles at family events very proud. He was rolling his eyes at me, but smiling.
Shut up and stay with me, stay with me or let go of my hands…
He gave in and started to dance with me, downing his beer fairly quickly, tossing the empty can into the woods, something that normally would’ve bothered me but I let it go, grabbing both my hands. He spun me around in a figure eight motion, then, very smoothly, dipped me.
“Dahling you dance divinely.” I put on a posh, aristocratic, English accent, popping my foot out.
Laughing, we dissolved into some solitary dancing, still holding hands. We flailed and jammed out through to the dwindling last beats of the song, soaking in the sound of the feedback of the speakers, staring each other directly in the eyes.
“Thanks for that.” He breathed.
“Yea… No problem.”
He smiled.
I smiled and shrugged back, biting my lip nervously.
A loaded silence followed. A silence that harmonized with the buzzing whine of the speakers and the rustling of the forest. A silence that made the stars overhead present between us. A silence that seemed to hold a secret that I longed to know, but was too afraid to ask. A silence that probably should have been addressed, but not that moment. So I broke it.
“Right,” I said “let’s see if we can find our way to this party.”
“Worse comes to worse,” he replied, clambering into the passenger seat, “we can always use astronavigation.”
I laughed and turned the key in the ignition, punching him for making fun of me.
It didn’t matter. None of it did. The past. The future. Whether or not we actually made it to the party. And we drove on, into the night, our spirits lifted by indie rock music, each other and the impermanence of summertime.
Clearly Tilting My Head 