Anywhere But Here

The smell of something burning forced me to pull over. A rogue cigarette butt boomeranged to the backseat and was now burning the upholstery. Tossing it to the tall grass, I stood up and lit another. Back in the driver’s seat an analog clock read 12:45 am, but standing in the clearing, closed eyes could have put it at high-noon. A white token with two gold painted A’s lay in the cup holder, tossed from the dashboard where I’d placed it, so proudly, just four days earlier. Now it was a token of boredom; a useless arcade chip holding no worth outside the cold hospital cafeteria it came from. 

A black pick up zooms by, and I speed towards town with barely enough gas to get home. There I’d feel better.

It was an empty yellow house with nothing in the fridge but two PBRs and a bottle of tabasco sauce, not counting the rotting hot dogs that had been there since June. It was August now, and hotter than hell. Florida’s midnight sun rustled me to the front porch swing. 

“Just four Reds left, and I bought them this morning.”

Staring at my car in the driveway, and the near-dead stray cat hobbling beside it, I thought to myself, “how quickly we get to the places we don’t want to be.”