by Eman Bouras

“Let’s go see God,” she said trying to kill us. Foot on gas. See red light. Hear engine purring. Eyes shut. Foot still on gas. Eyes open. See light pole. See light. See lone bird flying away and into traffic. Pray for it. Pray for yourself. Pray for her soul. See darkness. Sink into the metal plates of the car. But before all this, know that Laura Graze is dangerous. Your mother must have warned you about her. Didn’t you hear her?
Just like absinthe, she was half-god and half-reckless. But that didn’t stop anyone from loving her. Not even me. It must have been her bony artist hands, trying to make poetry out of everyone she touched. Wrapping herself around their ankles like seaweed each time she began to think that they would leave, and drowning them in the metaphorical overflowing bathtub of her love, while convincing them they could still breathe.
They could never leave until she had loved them just enough, in the right way, for her to birth a novel in the cervixes of the space between them— this was how she loved.
The truck driver lasted a month with her, and then she threw all the China plates out of the second story window and told him that he was too good at leaving, and her, too good at breaking things. She wrote a book of poems titled, ‘Rest Stops,’ and dedicated it to him.
I got a book out of it too. This time it was longer. This time I was the one doing the drowning.
I was the last one to love Laura before she was committed. It wasn’t my fault that she lost her mind; it wasn’t the alcohol or the poison either. It was all her. Her shoebox full of collected ex-lovers house keys had become so full that she could no longer bare not knowing whether or not she had truly loved the men she’d spent a few months with, written about, and then left.

She kissed me, and I could taste the salty Pacific Ocean between breaths. This time, she was not the one pulling ankles underwater.
         “You’re poison, Charles,” she said.
         “I know.”
        “You’re just like me,” she said twisting a strand of her yellow hair that looked silver only under the fluorescent kitchen lighting around and around her pinky finger.
We stood just close enough for our bodies to think they were touching, but just far enough to know that they weren’t. She was waiting for me to turn to her, just like the truck driver would, and take her in my arms. She was waiting to see who’d talk first, as if it was a game where the first one to speak loses.
But it wasn’t a game anymore, and she knew it. This was real.
The realness of whatever it was that we felt was exaggerated, though. It was not to be envied or mirrored, but pitied. We were thirty-something year olds wanting to feel something as deep and intoxicating enough that we’d not have ourselves to blame.
It was when we were driving on I-90 to the farmers market with the simmer of the Californian Santa Ana wind nestled between her body and mine that her lungs filled with water.

         “I love you,” she said. “God, I really do.”

I turned to her, the dangerous girl with dangerous words. I had nothing to say. She looked so beautiful right then. That’s how I’ll remember her, vulnerable and gulping for air.
The hands around the steering wheel were as real as my silence. The words coming out of her mouth were not. And then, her foot slammed hard on the gas pedal, and the car sung, as ghosts would sing if they were real and we believed in them.
         “Laura— this isn’t funny,” I said. My voice echoed in the car. The wind swallowed it whole. She couldn’t hear me. She didn’t want to. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
It was too late. Laura started to laugh, “Let’s go see God, baby.” And then we both sank heavy into the metal plates of the baby blue Sedan.
There was nothing poetic about our bodies slamming in unison with the force of car to pole, through June air. The keys in the ignition were no longer there. Blood was everywhere, more of hers than mine. Neither of us was sorry. That’s why they took her away.
Laura is still dangerous, but so am I.
 

 
[Featured]Digital Art Image Credit: heorte by J.A. Spahr-Summers. ©Copyright 2015, Jeffrey A. Spahr-Summers