by Coleman Bigelow
We sped forward, on our way to my middle school dance, with the exhaust groaning and the wheels spitting gravel. My slight torso sunk into the hollowed-out leather as the seatbelt’s triangle strap cut across my neck. Our ride was a Model 924-S in Carrara White, and the only model of Porsche I’ll forever associate with disaster.
“Do you feel the acceleration?” My father’s cinnamon breath filled the cramped interior. He was constantly chewing Dentyne to mask the smell of alcohol. “You feel that power?” he demanded, tousling my hair so roughly my head knocked against the window. As he sipped his roadie, the car hit a bump and scotch and soda splattered his fraying dress shirt. “Shit. Hand me that towel in the glove.”
I pulled out a small orange towel, still wet from its last use, and three tickets stamped VIOLATION fell into my lap. Dad wiped his shirt and turned up the radio as ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down” pulsed from his prized Blaupunkt speakers. He opened the sunroof and the whipping of the wind and the pulsing of the music pummeled me with invisible fists. “Come on, son. Get the pole out of your ass.” My chin trembled, and I covered it quickly with my hand as I tried to force my face into an expression of exhilaration.
“Your dad’s so cool,” my friends were always saying. But they didn’t have to live with him. They didn’t understand how there were was never any downtime. No quiet bonding moments. No little league coaching or pinewood derby construction with my dad. No help with math homework or stories before bed. Just relentless, insatiable mania and consumption.
“Whoa, sweet ride. Are you guys rich now?” my friend James asked as we walked into the school. James was my last close friend, but he was already drifting. He was taller, with a budding mustache, and girls who wanted to make out with him. James was the more outgoing, athletic type I knew my dad would have preferred for his own son.
“Did you see the car this kid showed up in?” James asked a group of popular seventh grade girls huddled by the water fountain. The girls stopped their giggling and turned to inspect me. “He’s got a Porsche!” James said, planting his oversized hand on my shoulder and causing me to crumple inward. One freckled girl named Katie, whose father owned a local car dealership, scrunched up her nose. “Where’d you buy it?” I wanted to brag, but I had no answers, so I just shrugged. Soon I was watching the backs of James and the girls as they entered the gym, with my mother’s screaming from the week before reverberating in my head. “Where did you get the money?”
Long after the dance ended, no one had come to fetch me, and I replayed the recent fights I’d overheard at home. My mother seething and spitting words like debt and DUI and repeating her most worrying accusation: “You haven’t been taking your pills.” A few parents shot me sympathetic glances as their kids climbed into their welcoming wagons and I sat shivering.
The cold of the stone stairs seeped up my spine as I waited for what would arrive. I dreaded the harsh glare of that Porsche’s pop-up eyes, but I was far more petrified of what I’d discover behind the driver’s eyes. My breath fogged in front of me and I pictured my father out on another joyride, either oblivious or indifferent to the suffocating fumes of his exhaust.
Coleman Bigelow’s stories have appeared recently (or are upcoming) in Abandon Journal, Corvus Review, Idle Ink, Bending Genres, Bright Flash Literary Review and Free Flash Fiction. Find more at: www.colemanbigelow.com Twitter: @ColemanBigelow IG: @cbigswrites
Emerge Literary Journal 