photo by Marco Verch via flickr
Wish I were there with you.
Anyway I’m gone as much as you are.
The words were scribbled on a receipt which faded on the dashboard, once-black ink steadily baking brown.
Sunlight poured in, casting specks from dead bugs plastered to the windshield across the brown face of a thickset girl. She hunched over a textbook propped upon the gearshift, filling the back of an envelope with tiny square writing.
I wonder if you’d like it here.
No ‘Dear,’ as if the recipient’s name were too precious to be casually read, or -- as no one Farah knew had any chance of doing that -- as if she wouldn’t admit to writing the sequel of that first love letter, weathered on the dashboard over so many miles, through messes she’d mostly cleaned up, and more than one storm.
Everything is beautiful. Copses of trees between the highways, trees and mountains for miles in every direction.
So was home, though, and you left that behind.
She’d passed a billboard on the interstate urging the world to Tell her how you FEEL!, and a metal Dairy Queen sign informing all passersby that it was Closed Sunday. What profit, Farah wondered, could be gained by paying for that sign, Closed Sunday, under every logo, every few mile markers, wherever in America truckers might stop for ice cream?
Kate would have some insight. Or she would just shake her head, customer-service smile caked on, so that only her eyes were wry. Kate’s Dairy Queen was open late, but Kate herself worked day shifts, and once she realized this Farah lost all cravings for ice cream after sunset.
I’m between a junkyard and an RV, surrounded by three or four broken-down cars. An actual junkyard -- rusted, twisted metal whose original use I don’t have the imagination for. Lots of old tires. Corrugated iron.
I passed a billboard
She tapped her pen on Pyrotechnics: Journeyman and crossed out the line.
I passed a billboard
I don’t think I ever told you, I didn’t used to like cherry cones.
I was noticing your sweater, that moss-colored wool one, and your eyes -- they don’t seem green, you know, until there’s something to contrast with -- so I think you asked me twice-- “Cherry or chocolate?”
“Whichever you like,” I’d said.
You only looked nonplussed, probably chose cherry because there was more left, no one else wanted it and you’re trained to use up old products. But let’s say I never thought of that, because since then I’d always go for that synthetic, clown-nose red.
I’m sure you don’t remember.
Remember when I asked you, later, walking home through the forest, if you really liked
Farah paused; did Kate really like chocolate? Or was it cherry she preferred?
Or did she, at the end of the day, swirl herself cones of vanilla, pure sugar with no added dyes…
Maybe she’d sampled everything, chosen her favorite, and made double each time a customer ordered one, stashed the duplicate in a freezer and ate it on breaks.
In another life, Farah would know.
She’d seen her with a milkshake once, tugging her apron off one-handed as she marched toward her blue Ford. Farah had watched from the sticky red table outside, then turned back to her notes, squinting in the half-light, her fingers growing sluggish from the cold. After Kate drove away, Farah stayed another half-hour, just to prove she hadn’t lugged a heavy textbook down so many dorm stairs on the chance that, after her shift, Kate might spare more than a smile and a hasty hello.
That time she hadn’t watched the blue Ford blaze down the road, vanish into the twilight like so many passing cars. Other times, she did, after she’d learned not to try to read about welding during evening, ice cream cooling her body, and instead she just happened to arrive when she was Kate’s last customer of the day.
Remember when I asked you, later, walking home through the forest, if you really liked had a tattoo?
You said you’d never get one, being an artist. You didn’t want another’s work on your body.
Not that Kate admitted to being an artist. Farah pieced it together, invented it from scattered hints Kate dropped at checkout.
You asked me if I would, and I showed you the white dove. Well, told you about it.
Farah hadn’t had the white dove when she’d first imagined this scene, but she had the place marked on her body, and a mason jar full of crumpled ones and fives.
I showed you where it would be. You traced the outline on my ribs. Your fingers were warm, in that forest where everything was cool, becoming cold.
“What does it mean?”
I told you then about Tesla. How most days my eyes ached from reading late into every night, and my shoulders knotted from lugging textbooks around, but at the table laden with dirty dishes and twisted scrap metal, the highway so loud, I could still marvel at genius: Tesla invented filaments by fickle lantern light, and it was all I could do to retrace his steps spelled out before me in hundred-dollar textbooks.
When you get down to it, welding is feral. The fire will burn you. The metal is molten, you are poking and plying atoms so hot that their bonds are liquid, forming shapes which will last tens of thousands of years.
“So does it mean genius? Or ancient, pretty things?”
I’m always caught unawares when you ask questions that you don’t need to, and fix me with your pine-tree eyes, as if you really want to know.
“I think it means you can have all that and still be batshit crazy.”
Farah hadn’t known what Kate’s real smile looked like then, although she liked to think she knew it now.
She used to come to Dairy Queen just to escape, to walk through a forest that was slowly losing its magic. Then she noticed the girl with the red braid, and she read those four letters, and eventually she took note of when Kate was working and when she, Farah, craved ice cream.
It was as sweet and fleeting as those cherry cones. Only both of them had horizons to chase, and so much sugar dulled the senses, made truth harder to savor. Did Kate honestly bask in their banter; were they joking with the same flavor?
Or was Farah a fool for mooning outside fast food joints over a girl who didn’t know her name?
Not like you thought it was magical. I think you hated Dairy Queen. You hated our little town, didn’t you?
I wish I could have shown you. But I wasn’t feeling it, either. I walked through that forest and forgot its beauty. I’d already found the fairy circles and dug up all the seeing stones, and it was just a bunch of trees that shade the path and drink up all the sun. Slippery pine needles might twist an ankle under the weight of a new heavy backpack.
You brought a little magic back, even without being there. I could find moss the color of your eyes, and your hair in the big, fallen leaves that crunch underfoot.
I guess you showed me the magic of the road. The glimmer between those tired truckers stopping in.
During breaks she leaned against the back wall, looking out. Longing filled her green eyes as she listened for the roar of the highway.
On the very last day -- which wasn’t special at all, really, only it happened to be the day Farah waited for Kate to come out, nearly ran into her pretending she was about to go in -- on that day she said, “Hey. I like you. Would you -- I don’t know -- want to grab coffee, or…?”
Kate blinked, darkened lashes flitting. Then something tugged at her lips, a grin full of the wryness she usually corralled up in her eyes. “Is that why you’re here all the time?”
Before Farah could answer, Kate shrugged. “Look, I would. I really would. But I can’t. I’m moving cross-country. This is my last day.”
She was, in fact, wearing no apron, just a nametag she passed from hand to hand. In that moment, Farah completely believed her. That really was a warmth in her chest.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. I think I’ll find out, though.” A sigh, and Kate rubbed her arms, glanced to the lavender horizon. “I just need to be gone.”
“For your art?”
A look, like who said I do art?, but she said, “For me. Um, what are you doing?”
“Mechanical engineering. It’s a scholar….” Farah realized as she spoke that Kate meant tonight, what are you doing tonight. She chuckled. “Look, could I walk you…”
“My car is just there.” And there was a moment where Kate could have gestured, come, walk me to it, and they could have wandered past the Ford and into the forest, talking softly until night fully set in.
But Kate toyed with the end of her red braid, wearing a wistful smile, full of what if. “I’m sorry. I have a lot to pack.”
“Right. See you.”
Farah realized after saying so that she would not, in fact, see Kate, but Kate didn’t correct her, just turned and walked toward the car. And Farah, figuring there was nothing really to lose, watched her reverse and rev the engine and give a little wave.
Then Kate was racing away.
She would be a long way gone.
Farah’s mind ran in circles that night, analyzing every word of their very longest conversation. She figured Kate might have lied. That she could go back to Dairy Queen and find her swirling cones.
But she didn’t really like ice cream, and she liked the nostalgia. Besides, her scholarship left little time for romance, for dipping toes in the stream and slipping, splashing, swaying home with heavy jeans. Who knew if Kate felt the same?
That night, Farah looked out from her dorm balcony, past gum blackened on sidewalks, past the tops of trees, and watched the cars on the highway. She saw a blue Ford and decided that Kate wasn’t lying, even if that particular Ford couldn’t reasonably be hers.
So Farah went back to Dairy Queen just once, years later, the last night before she, too, hit the road: packed her clothes and her degree, the letter from a metalworkers’ commune halfway across the country, and strapped the seat belt over her white dove tattoo. Then she flew away, too.
Maybe you made me long to go. Or I guess that longing was within me, when the leaves and the trees couldn’t satisfy me, when I didn’t have textbooks to weigh me down.
Maybe your leaving reminded me.
Maybe I’ll see you.
She did not add Love, Farah.
She folded the envelope, neatly, and tossed it over her shoulder. Then she heaved the textbook onto the passenger’s seat and began to drive. Rusty corrugated iron and broken car skeletons fell away as she took the last left out of town.
Farah merged onto the highway. She let the windows halfway down, and the wind came in and snatched the letter, blew it about. Farah glanced in the rearview just in time to see the envelope flying out.
Maybe to somebody a long way gone.
The radio bummed to static, and she flicked it off. Her hand roved from the radio to the dashboard. She peeled up the receipt, that first love letter to a girl who filled her daydreams.
Farah crumpled the letter, as if to throw it out the window, too.
Trees whipped past. The wind rushed in. Something held her back.
Farah slipped the old receipt into her shirt pocket.
Wish I were there with you.
Anyway I’m gone as much as you are.
Amber Velez has been published in Broken Pencil Magazine, Silver Blade Magazine, and Theakers Quarterly Fiction, and has interned at writing retreats from California to Devonshire, UK. Other accomplishments include visiting every single coffee shop in her hometown of Tucson, AZ. Check out more of her work at ambervelez.com.