Where the Sidewalk Ends

Wrinkled and abused rubber slipped along the glass, leaving a stubborn glossy film clinging to the windshield. Its octave ranging tones played soccer with air molecules in the rusted car.

A young woman held on to the wobbling steering wheel, leaning slightly forward against her flannel armor in an effort to gauge the location of the blurry asphalt her life depended upon. A sigh slipped out of her lips like a family secret and rested in a foggy resentment against the windshield.

Chipped hands ripped from the wheel made contact with the fog in an effort to clear the path. Clammy chills ran up her arm as she spread her fingerprints across the liquidized sigh. She pulled her hand back, clenching and unclenching it in an effort to ward off the dew. Her front tooth skated against the round of her thumbnail as she stared out the window and checked the rearview mirror who did nothing but smile back at her own reflection.

Her mind drifted back to that evening in the orchard. She had lodged herself between the trunk of an apple tree and its moss covered bough in an effort to hide from the world. Her wrinkleless hands hurriedly inked letters onto the back of topographic map paper, hoping fervently to drain her brain before the sun set its itinerary for the other hemisphere.

Only a few ticks lay between the car ride and the witching hour. She wasn’t ready to leave eighteen.

Her windshield wipers gave out with a squeal of expiration and lay protesting in the middle of her windshield. She closed her eyes for a second to get away from the halo of headlights behind her and pulled over to the semicircle of gravel that miraculously appears on country roads at uneven intervals.

The slash of the other cars tires vibrated the car in tune to the rain which kept up a steady song. Her fingers groped for the keys and pulled them out, severing the main artery to the engine.

Suddenly, it was just the rain and a girl. She leaned her seat back until it bumped into the second half of the car. And for the first time in a long time, she just

Breathed. Youth ran through her veins, transmitting from atom to atom. The past year floated back to her. Ripping out the Mad Scientist’s heart, leaving her skin a permanent note, taking one last stab at high school with a Lost Boy. Drunken mistakes near the shore, hours spent with just enough pages in a book to make enjoying dusk by herself on a country porch surreal, deciding to run north, getting there and realizing just how essential her mother was to the core of her being, loving Lovely no matter what his determinate and for the first time, having him love her back, realizing how young she was and how beautiful such youth made her in virgin actions towards growing up.

The car seemed warmer. Muscles gently twitched themselves upwards and a smile counteracted the ocean leaking one drop at a time out of eyelash umbrellas.

She woke up to find herself caught in a world of fogged up glass. The pictures she had drawn in past days smiled at her, telling her secrets of which boy smelled like Vermont leather and which girl smiled just a little differently.

She pulled up her seat until her eyes stared back at her once again from the mirror. Her fingers found the iced over keys and she breathed life back into the engine. Halos of headlight were nowhere to be seen, and she pulled back onto road after finding that her wipers had a little more strength in them.

And she went back to her world. Young, but just a little less so.