
[Wk9] Brack Love
The convertible had 107k miles on it, but it was purple and the transmission worked and the battery was fine. Alcy wanted the red Ford; it was cheaper and had fewer miles on it. She had her hand on her purse when she caught the aluminous flash at the edge of her eye. Alcy turned to the little car, with its worn leather seats, and put her hand on its violet hood. She feigned oblivion when the stunning figure at the front of the store left her enchanted lean against the eager white wall of the warehouse and approached her. Her lie was loud despite her commitment to it; even her long dead folks had heard her gasp when she’d walked into the dealership and saw… her, her wide hips and pale narrow legs in loose cutoffs while she idly fondled the trek of shimmery green-black hair that coiled around her fingers and waist in shiny spirals.
Her name was Lorelai and she was working part time at the used car dealership while she tried to get singing gigs at the bars along the tourist strip near the ocean. Virginia Beach wasn’t much interested in Lorelai’s work. She told Alcy, over papers and a down payment on the car, that her music was atypical and really, it was best in the quiet of the night, at the end of a pier, not in a loud bar.
“But bars are where I landed,” she said, her voice a low metallic glide that slunk to the small of Alcy’s back and held her there. “What’s your name?”
She asked the question entirely with her eyes, slate blue discs under velvet black curtains and brows that draped across the ridge above her eyes, glittering strands of rockweed under an August moon.
“I’m Alcy,” Alcy said, and promptly blushed. Then Alcy asked her out, stumbling sloppy through the ask because somehow her heart had forgotten what it meant to fall hard and fast and thorough.
Lorelai filled her minutes till they dripped memories before they’d happened. They drove along the coast, the roof back on Alcy’s car so the brine of the horizon mixed with the mineral musk that clung to Lorelai’s skin even through showers and perfume. Lorelai would chide the car, winking at Alcy when she said the engine sounded like firecrackers in sand, the AC like thunder across the ocean’s floor. They fucked recklessly, in the back of the car, on the side of the road, and on every beach. Lorelai would watch Alcy soak her toes in the waves while she sang the lilting melody-free rock of her songs from her perch in the mild dunes. Time floated and froze and ran screaming away while they flirted themselves into intimacy.
Lorelai ran into the restaurant because it was quiet and serene. She insisted it looked hopeful. Alcy sat with the engine running in the empty parking lot and watched Lorelai slip behind its sketchy doors. She soon heard Lorelai singing and figured she’d grab a coffee while the audition wrapped up; there was a drive-thru Starbucks just a few blocks away.
When she pulled back into the parking lot, the restaurant was silent. She waited. An hour ticked by, and she went up to the doors. They were locked. It was dark. Alcy stood, with her hand gripping the handle, and had to fight the sticky notion that she’d hallucinated the entire affair. Then she saw a cluster of strands from Lorelai’s cutoffs wedged underneath the door.
The police came; the restaurant had closed down eight months ago and they told her no one was inside. Alcy shrugged. She nodded. She clenched the fibers of the cutoffs in her defiant palm.
The car was still purple, but after Lorelai disappeared, it was just a car. Old, rickety, and without metaphor. Alcy resumed the life she’d had before she’d met her; waitressing and getting ready for school in the fall. Weeks crunched by, but she couldn’t fix the gaping magic-less hole Lorelai had left in her soul. It yawned at her and made her twitch. When her cousin asked if she wanted to drive down to the Eastern Shore for a weekend before classes started, she said yes because at least it would suck up time.
Alcy sat in her car, with all its rumbles, watching the implacable gray of a waiting storm stretch across the sky. She neared the Chesapeake Bay Bridge ill prepared for the leap her breath took at the sight of the water under the infinite spindle of the bridge. The AC in her car thundered like it used to and the engine barked hope laden firecrackers into the salty fog. As she crossed the threshold of the bridge, Alcy heard the rock and catch of Lorelai’s song in the watery tussle beneath her. Her face was wet with ocean spray and loss. She gazed at the bridge, pinching itself off into sea and sky, and let her eyes trek the water’s course along the bridge’s side.
The winding hum of music she’d once cherished filled her ears as the sky darkened. She looked at the foamy peaks behind the rails of the bridge and jerked her wheel to the right. Alcy slammed her foot on the accelerator and ricocheted off the bridge. They hung, Alcy and her purple car, for the barest of seconds above a riot of salty depth. She inhaled mineral musk, sudden and inexplicit, in that split second hang, a sated smile stretched across her face.