"When the Dust Clears" - CTS

When the dust clears

 Apple handed me the knife and I violently tore through the veiny twelve by twelve inch envelope. It contained a cassette tape, a gun and a note. We sat down and dug our fingers into the sand. We didn’t have any water left and our teepee resembled the trimmed, scattered hair on a barbershop’s floor. The last boat that we saw sailed along the horizon and evaporated on the edge where the water meets the sky. We tried to call out to it but our mouths were subdued by dirt and our noses caked with seaweed. I played the tape. The eerie music scratched the insides of my ears.

My nails were chewed down to the nub. Blood ran down my fingers from the ruts of my cuticles. Her burnt smile and temporarily squinted eyes frightened me even though I knew her from the days she chewed the heads off Barbies at age five. Our skin was scarred from the dead branches in the forest. Her eyes were drowned in her skull and my cracked hair lay dead on my cheeks. Our scalps were boiled but our eyes were cold. The light in them burned out with our final bowl of porridge. We discovered life of the homeless when we arrived here. We have lived on the outskirts of California near the Redwood forests for a year. Our coats were our second skin. Apple’s veracity charged me. Without her I would be a flattened rats carcass on the side of the road with no one to appreciate me besides young boys fascinated by death.

Apple said, “Let’s hitch a ride down to the city.”

I said, “Let’s go.” We carried our backpacks and hiked to the highway. The bitter, rocky beach offered no more consolation. We walked up the path onto a flat road, which led down to the highway.  We held out our arms and waved to cars as they drove by. The eroding air bit my finger ridges away. “The wind up here makes me feel alive,” exclaimed Apple, but I found it suffocating. She took in a deep breath and blew out hazy smoke through her nostrils as if she was clearing out a sooty pipe. A matte black Lexus pulled over and a young man stuck his head out the window. He looked like the type of character who had blocked out the windows of his house with duct tape. He opened the door and said, “You girls need a ride?”

I leapt in the backseat and Apple followed me. “Guess that’s a yes then,” said the driver. He began to tell us about his trip to the Bellagio in Vegas and we pretended to listen. He asked if we were hungry and gestured to the coolers in the trunk. We ripped the food apart. Apple and I chugged down some Coronas and wolfed down a couple of meatball subs. The inside of the Lexus smelt like fresh meat sliced in pieces and when I examined the floor I found a backpack. Inside it appeared to be a sorority girl - hiking trip survival pack, which included an issue of Seventeen-magazine and oil free concealer. My eyes met Apple’s. She drew a telephone wire through my mind and received my thoughts.

“Can you pull over at this gas station? We need to buy a few things,” said Apple. “Thanks for the ride though.” He said, “Oh come on just let me get off the highway first!” I reached for the gun from my bag and jammed it into his back. “Listen we’re not fucking around. Stop the car or you’re dead.” He abruptly pressed down on the brakes. Apple snatched the shiny pistol from me and shot a bullet at close range through his skull. I threw his body out of the window and we took of in the Lexus.

 “Wow that was a powerful sandwich,” I said. Apple’s unrelenting smile broke out into a sharp laughter. The wheels of the car flattened the road and the blue walls around us collapsed. Apple sailed on a murderous high and I absorbed her energy. The light reappeared in her eyes. Her dusty lungs cleared. Her body weight increased by ten pounds and a healthy woman replaced the skeleton that was driving before. Her hair regained its luster. My skin became smooth and my hair grew back. The fire in my chest ignited itself. We sped down highway 101. “We should go to Vegas,” she said. The red rings around her pupils spun with intensity. “Lets stop first and clean this car out.” She agreed and we stopped at a discreet viewpoint. We emptied the trunk, hid the coolers on the side of the cliff and wiped down the whole interior. “We’re only thirty miles outside Los Angeles, let’s stay there tonight,” Apple said.  I turned to double check the trunk and I saw a handle at the front of it. I pulled it up. Benjamin Franklin stared blankly up at me three million times. “What are you doing back there Storm?” Apple asked.

“Nothing. I just wanted to look at the trunk another time before we leave.” I replied.  “Let’s go,” she said. We picked up some speed and then traffic hit. The rows of cars were lined up like bums who waited every month for their social security check. Apple turned on the radio. “Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small, that we can never get away from the sprawl” seeped out the speaker’s voids. But we were leaving the sprawl. The crystal clear voice and innovative melody of Arcade Fire pushed the traffic through the bottleneck. We were on the way to a new identity, a new version of ourselves. We filled up the tank with gas and switched places in the car before the dreaming, drooling cashier could wake up from his wet dream.