Everclear

I'm a passenger.  She is driving because she is not quite as drunk as me.  

This would be an accident waiting to happen if it weren't so well rehearsed.  Practice makes perfect.

Gas station.  Night blank in glaring white lights spotted from a mile.

The crunch of displaced sand beneath our rubber soles.  The tap of footsteps through the clean, silent air.  Muted echoes in the desert of stillness.

She laughs at me.  I stagger and stare blurrily up at the swarm of insects ambushing the light fixtures of the overhang.  My vision warps itself to the multi-colored signs at the front.  There's Food.  There's Beer.  There's Gasoline.  

A gasoline smell.  Oil stained pavement shifts into view and makes a deranged face at me.  The former day's heat still evaporates from the concrete up to strangle me.

 A breeze washes me.  The door handle is cold.  Glass reflects and stings my eyes.  

Her hand on my back slides down...a soft arm around me.  Her smile is there.  She asks me something.  I don't answer, just smile.  She laughs and steers me against her.  I can see down her low-cut shirt.  The first time I've seen her.  Peach colored, with a slight red afterglow from the seatbelt shadowing the middle in a rosy shade.  

I start to cry in stifled sniffles.   She asks me what's wrong.  I don't answer because I don't know.

Women love the romance of a dying man.  She tightens her arms on me, steering me through a blur of white tile bordered in bright ad-colors.  She guides me like a friend, like a lover, like a guard escorting a prisoner....