Hatchback

Tess Kelly

Tess (right) and her sister Liz

Word Count 545

We took a trip, me and her, after I quit my dumb job at the Forest Service, after I jumped in line to be “bought out” for four grand, after they told me I couldn’t come back for five years per the agreement and after I laughed and told them to ban me for life because the job was crap, all that filing, all that pretending it fed my soul in the slightest way. I worked in some musty federal building near the San Francisco Bay, a building stuffed with bored bureaucrats, a dumpy old building in such a pretty city, a quirky kaleidoscope city as it was back then, before mega-corporations colonized it with their ilk. But the price tag of such marvel was daunting, even in the nineties, and I was glad to leave while in my twenties, glad to look for cheaper digs up north, but before I drifted to Portland I joined my younger sister for a trip to the deep south, the Gulf-rimmed states as mysterious as a sphinx.

And so we packed up her white Honda Civic in New Jersey, crammed a few hundred dollars in our wallets, and drove to the hills of Maryland where our dad grew up and stared at the church parking lot that used to be his house, then blasted past the front yard trampolines of West Virginia, past the dry and bourbon-soaked counties of Kentucky, then traipsed around Graceland, a rather small mansion for a king. We drove, and we visited former slave plantations, although “antebellum homes” sounded nicer, drove by the flimsy shacks and shanties where Blacks lived in the Delta, and wondered how the fuck this could be, as if America had ever been anything else. We toured the Bayou at midday but it could have been midnight with hooting owls roosting like sentinels in thick cypress darkness, ate shrimp po’ boys and crisped catfish to the brassy soundtrack of New Orleans, savored southern gentlemen, particularly in Mobile, and floated in sea water that enveloped us like a womb. We drove, and it’s hard to remember all the places we slept, the sanctioned campgrounds, the piney patches of woods, the friends of friends’ floors, but there was also the Civic’s hatchback we crawled into, where we dreamt curled like puppies next to each other.

One night we parked in a Baptist church parking lot in Mississippi, or maybe it was Louisiana, because that night we scared each other into believing if we slept outside alligators would clamp our bodies in their large jaws and shake us like rag dolls. So we slept in that tight space and neither one of us was very big but it felt very small and stiffened our young joints and in the morning a bespectacled pastor gently tapped the window and my sister unrolled it and he kindly smiled and said good morning, and kindly said Sunday service would be starting in half an hour and would we mind leaving the parking lot for the congregation? We said of course not and thank you, and before we could even stash our pillows a bouquet of ladies strolled toward us, regal in elegant hats and the bright colors of their Sunday finery.

Tess Kelly's work has appeared in Ruminate and The RavensPerch, and will soon appear in FiveMinuteLit. She is the first prize recipient in the 2020 Women's National Book Association awards, in the category of Flash Prose. She lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.