Thursday
An excerpt from “Wrote This Just Now” by Knott Intuit, the world’s worst flash fiction writer.
We were teenagers, just over two in dog years. Her name was Carey; mine isn’t important. What is important, very important, is that we did what young people did in those days who had just gotten their driver’s licenses. We drove around in a car.
A song that both epitomized that time and dripped with irony (both dramatic and otherwise) played on the radio. We were high, too. Really high. I mean burnt to a crisp.
“Hey,” she said to me one day.
“Hey,” I replied to her.
“Life is so…”
“You said it.”
It was the kind of day only those who experienced such a day can describe. Words don’t do it justice.
“Where we going?” I asked her from the passenger seat next to the driver’s seat.
“In circles, baby.”
I loved her then. I loved her so so much. More than I loved blue marshmallows, Bright Eyes. Her eyes shown like blue Juuls with cotton candy cartridges. But she would never love me. I knew that. There was a word for such a love. Unrequited? No. Some other word. One not invented yet.
“You thirsty?” She pulled off at the local gas station that sold stuff other than gas in a tiny market shop. “Red Bull?”
I handed her some crumpled up bills, but she wouldn’t pay them. Electric. Water. A dentist’s for a chipped tooth. I stuffed them back in my pocket, handed her a five.
“This one’s on me.”
A minute later, she was dead, killed by the gunman or gunwoman whom I thought looked a bit dangerous but then I thought, Nah, that’s just my own paranoia. I was thinking all that until I heard the gunshots, and ten minutes later, when I ran inside, she was there, on the ground, and I promised then and there, as I pried the Red Bull from her hands and gulped it down, I’d write about her and that kind of love that has no word for it in every story, in every space, in every genre. Carey on. I say. Carey On.