To the People We Left

            We are cheaters and we are liars.  We are sweet and cruel. We are full of whiskey and cocaine. In a

borrowed car, we speed through the Texas panhandle and don’t look back. The dark swallows us. Our eyes

cloud and it’s hard to tell if we are driving on ground or sky. We fly through Oklahoma and into Colorado. 

We decide to turn west.

The days pool and congeal. We can’t tell one from the other. It is just after dawn when we reach Nevada. The moon and the sun are both visible above the desert road. They are so close they could almost touch. We pull over and sleep tangled together in the backseat of the car. The day is blinding and white. We wake and stretch and smoke. Our voices raw and our mouths dry we finish the last fifth of whiskey.

We have secrets. And scars. We are together because of both. We grin at each other like cats and silently smoke our cigarettes. We spend the last of our money getting married by a bald Elvis wearing a white polyester suit. His sequins twinkle and wink as we say I do. 

We promise we won’t do to each other what we’ve done to other people. We promise to be honest and sweet. We promise the same promises we’ve promised before. We promise this time it’s different. We get another drink and we laugh. Driving on stolen gas, we head west again. We want to see the ocean. We want to last until then.

Tanda Word is finishing her Master's in creative writing at Texas Tech University. She has stories upcoming in The Oracular Tree and Underground Voices. Tanda is currently trying to finish a collection of short stories for her thesis so she can leave Lubbock and move somewhere with trees, hills, and Jack in the Box.