THE DRIVER

The ugly, exhausted car wheezed and propelled itself forward onto the dry Southern Oregon highway. Its dented silver body had been punched so deep that it was now completely tilted sideways, forcing its entire form to move in an awkwardly undulating up/down/up/down motion. The driver was new to the car, new to the area, but not new to being alone.

The similarities between driver and car were immediate and certain, at least to the initiated: both had been starkly abused, both leaned hard to the left, both were twenty-something years old, both were abandoned without an owner or family, and both had bleak futures in the dull, conservative town they found themselves in.

The driver had bought the car a few weeks ago for $300. She had moved to the desolate and dusty municipality in August after selling everything she owned in another violently white enclave of a city. Arriving alone with one suitcase after briefly spending three days, three months ago with a long haired, false-mirrored, almost-gentle spirit, she had seen a potential pathway to some kind of rural, low-grade joy. His letters after leaving their union promised something new, possibly real. But after flying into the tiny local airport of his hometown, he had forgotten in his drug haze that she was even coming on that day … leaving her alone and abandoned at the airport. She immediately knew the prospects were dim. 

A low-paying job at a physically demanding and degrading lumber mill followed a few weeks later while they lived in a shadowy, cramped bedroom at his parents’ loud and dirty home. Her small, working man’s hands fed glorious forests into monstrous, ravenous jaws that splintered the cuticles of her fingers and soul.

Bleeding trees and cold machinery. 

This began the downturn of her lips and fingers into dead roots of buried hope. 

In the fall she had asked him to help save money for the abortion she needed because he felt condoms weren’t natural and she was atavistically insecure in addition to not yet knowing how to say no. But late September he was randomly arrested one night for dealing weed and used that cash for bail without telling her until weeks later.

And those were the imprints that led to this October day: her twenty-fourth birthday. Driving that fucked up car back to that fucked up redneck house. 

Alone.

The hot crimson vinyl interior of the car started feeling even more excruciating than the pain that began forming in her belly. Knifing cramps pinched their blades into her abdomen, making the leaning car seem even more absurd and lumbering as she drove back to that suffocating, dreaded bedroom that was now her entire life. With all of their money gone, she had been drinking heavily on purpose every night, as it was her only and desperate solution to obliterate the life growing inside of her. This also doubled in duty to help drown out the nightmarish Planned Parenthood voice that had whispered between her legs, “yes you are pregnant, but you don’t have enough money to do anything about it.” She had been in communion with her body daily, telling that dreaded thing: “Please - you don’t want me. Go to someone else. You don’t want to be born into *this*. I am not right for you. I don’t want you, but I still love you. Just GO.”

Pressing down again on the pedal of that sweltering, damaged hulk of an auto the driver sped towards her country slum thralldom. She sobbed through the angular pain, which kept mocking that unwanted void of her goddamn abundantly fertile womb. Waves of cold then fiery primal sweat pulsed through her pores and collected into every weakened pocket of her limp muscles. 

Bent over, she fell out of the car, struggling to open the home’s dilapidated door. Nobody was there. She crawled down the hallway and threw herself into the bathroom. It was then that the undecided babe finally listened. It was bloody and beautiful. That little clump of undefined energy and cells left her body, on her twenty-fourth birthday. This made every previous dream in her mind an even more lonely, long, and longed-for lightning bolt that would never strike near her formerly sacred and now desperately bleak future ground. 

But it was still perfect. Perfect and depressing and alone in a small, putridly decorated mauve bathroom. It was the best birthday gift ever, swirling down a White City, Oregon toilet. 

Yet afterwards, there she was again.

Alone.

Alone and with nobody available to receive nor comfort the increasingly walled off feelings that were both celebratory and deeply horrified at what had just happened. 

She heard the electric snap of insects dying upon the bug control device hanging outside the living room window. 

The driver wiped herself off and cleaned up the mess. She went into their dully lit bedroom and sat on the mattress. As she dove back into the silent refuge of herself, she simply waited inside of that swiftly darkening and screamingly empty house. 

Alone.