It was time. She’d fought against it for so long. It was like a burning in her belly and it made her fingers tingle. The need coursed through her every time she thought of it. She often imagined living out the last days of her life in the desert, drying up and desiccated with a few possessions and her bones as the last traces she’d leave on earth. It’s not as violent as that sounds; she imagined that it would be a peaceful time. But for now, she wanted to straddle something, to feel it between her thighs, something more powerful than herself, propelling her forward into an unknown future.
First, she had needed to find someone who would sell it to her. She wanted to fall in love with it for the briefest of moments and know that along the journey her relationship to it would grow. This opportunity opened up to her sooner than expected. She had finally dumped that good-for-nothing male model, Paul. She imagined his insipid freckled face receding in the distance as she drove. There was nothing left for her in LA, the modeling agency folded, and with Paul keeping the apartment they shared. The vacuousness of her life there did not lend itself to any loyalty.
That is why she found herself at the entrance to a dusty barn.
“So, what’ll it be?”, the fat man in the red shirt and blue overalls said with a craggy cigar bouncing from and discoloring his lips. She smelled the air: car exhaust, dog shit, and the man’s stinging BO. She contemplated the bulge of his rotund belly, almost resting on his thighs even as he stood. Instead of being repulsed, she was absently intrigued by the scene, but she was there for one thing and one thing only.
It was candy apple red with a thin layer of dust over its luminescent paint. It was going to be a hard ride from LA to Albuquerque, but it had finally come time to do what she has always dreamed of doing.
Hopefully, it wouldn’t end in her death. But going out in fiery blaze didn’t seem so bad, either.
Perhaps, she’d settle down in the quiet wildness of the desert, buying her own little pink hacienda. She wanted to be the kind of woman who aged gracefully like Georgia O’Keefe, among the bleached skulls of powerful animals, wearing turquoise jewelry and swaying peasant skirts with a wagon wheel for a coffee table and nothing separating her from the dry hot afternoons and the surprisingly cool nights. She wanted a colander of stars at which to stare and to live in the alienness of such stark natural beauty.
She threw her leg over the seat, smearing the red dust along her sweaty legs. She kicked it into first gear. It sputtered and died. She tried again and it came to life like a feral barn cat. She pressed herself down and tried not to groan in pleasure at the vibrating pressure there.
With lit eyes, she glanced over the man’s sandy stubble and into his hard black eyes.
“I’ll take it.”
Drinkers with Writing Problems 