Sure, sex is great, but have you ever clocked out of a waitress shift on a night when everything went right instead of wrong and at the exact moment you’re pulling out of the parking spot you performed laborious geometry to fit into someone yells “I love your truck!” and you drive home with the windows down blasting Tori Amos and you find that you don’t care, not even a little, if you’re hitting the notes because it’s a warm, wet night in deep spring and every frog in the world sings along with you until your voice is a part of a huge, swelling chorus and you suddenly remember the girl you fell in love with when you were fifteen. Her name was Miriam, pronounced Mee-ree-AHM, and you remember how your guts twisted when she pressed the henna into your scalp and how, after, your hair looked just the same but you felt transformed as you watched her strip oh god pearl-skinned-naked, red-bush-burning, and splash, grinning, into her family’s fancy salt-water pool. And you realize it doesn’t hurt anymore, this memory and the shame you always carried with it. You hurtle through the night like a rattling, rusted-out meteor, prodding all your old wounds like a tongue in a row of bloody sockets and you think this can’t be right and you wonder what’s wrong with you, but then the musk of full-blown roses fills the cab of your loveable old truck and nothing, nothing, nothing hurts at all.
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Lindsey Pharr writes from a little cabin in the woods near Asheville, NC. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, River Teeth, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, KY.
Artwork by Dinty W. Moore