“Wrote This Just Now,” from the world’s worst flash fiction writer

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.