CW: violence, self-harm.

​​Her blood will be spilled; she has negotiated this with the client in advance. The young woman wiggles toes against the thick wool socks she wears inside her 1460s, neither of which is tied. She can trace through pressure points one lace as it snakes between the leather and her ankle to rest coiled beneath a heel. The temperature has dropped another ten degrees since she pulled off the highway, and her breath—blue and thin beneath the lone sclerotic light guarding this lot—is torn from her mouth by a truculent wind. Under her black riding jacket, she has on a hooded gray sweatshirt; she pulls its cowl over her head now with fingers numb from the four minutes she’s stood outside her truck.
    “Where is this fucker?” she asks.
    Headlights wink from an orchid horizon, her answer closing distance
    Beaten, sure. But she never consented to hypothermia. Sullen, she turns her back and cups lighter to cigarette. Her rules purport order, and she recites them to herself again, as if in their enumeration they accord some protective dominion—which she accedes they do not—but along with the cigarette, serve wholly to arrest her trembling hands and bring her heart rate under control:
    (1) Client passes initial Kik interview and Venmo’s $500 non-refundable appointment fee; $500 non-refundable activity fee due upon arrival.
    (2) Before session commencement, the client agrees to be photographed with her—nuclear insurance against her turning up missing or dead. 
    (3) No fists to her face.
    (4) No intentional compound fractures.
    (5) No session will last longer than 120 seconds or continue if she should lose consciousness.
    (6) Absolutely no kicking.
    (7) Sexual contact is forbidden.
    (8) Her safe word, if uttered, terminates the session—time is never prorated.
    There are clubs, of course, for this nature of congress. Dungeons with monitors and “safer” play spaces. But this is not kink. It prowls the deep verdure beyond primal. It is truth pacing inside her, pulsing amber heat. It mewls in complaint. Snaps teeth. Rolls eyes. Circles until sated. 
    She’s become inured to the untold number who hunger to assist in her manifestation, yet remains in awe at the great distances they pilgrimage to lay hands upon her, and to the derelict and haunted tracts at which she finds herself shepherding such traffic—within a grove of naked alders rising from the ridge beyond a city landfill; inside an abandoned clapboard church, rusted playground apparatus quartered outside in shadow like armored behemoths from a dismembered epoch; behind a shuttered Indian boarding school, austere headstones in its gated cemetery long since pushed untrue by frost heave. Tonight, she is parked along a lost stretch of nowhere nearly an hour beyond Laramie, Wyoming, upon the frozen and certain pale gravel of an untenanted weigh station.
    She drags off her cigarette. Uses her palm to swipe at a runny nose. “What’s two minutes?” she asks against the wind.
    It depends on the client. Men harboring secrets and those with clear-eyed fervor are the worst: the pastorate, junior college football players, swaggering sons who would wrest greatness from this, their America. Once, the assistant warden of a girls’ correctional facility in southeastern Montana had driven over eight hours to break her jaw with an illegal uppercut, before removing his heavy leather belt and buckle-whipping her until she passed out. She swam in red revolutions through coils of barbed wire until she awoke alone, her laugh fracturing a cobalt pre-dawn, black blood staining her teeth—the rupturing of her most recent miscarriage.
    A rumbling on tonight’s ribbon of asphalt. The oncoming car enters a swale, headlights momentarily swallowed, but immediately visible again. Music blares from after-market speakers: KRQU 98.7—Vintage Vinyl. The client is driving much too fast. Maybe 80. The back tires lock and squelch and the sedan shudders to a stop one hundred yards beyond where the young woman stands shivering under fluorescent coruscation.
    Idling. The consonance of high plains wind. 
    Tail lights wink and the car reverses course. Turns into the lot. Passes—its occupants peering out at her, unblinking. In addition to the driver, whose face is obscured by the raised cowl of a dark pullover, there are three people inside: in the passenger’s seat, feet unshod despite the cold and perched by their heels above the glove compartment, slouches a woman who is at least 45, but in whose face is pinched a petulance of someone much younger; behind the driver, wearing a loose beanie over cinereous shoulder-length hair, sits a tattooed crone intent on the hand-rolled joint she hasps to her lips with a roach clip; and beside her, a young girl of eleven or twelve—her face moonlike in its wonder—leans into her window, fingers splayed across the glass like pallid exclamation points.
    The driver reaches up and adjusts the rearview mirror. The girl has turned and now gazes at the young woman from out of the back window, her chin resting on small hands. Her lips move, responding to a comment or query. The car moves to the far edge of the lot, performs a y-turn, and returns. The young woman shields her eyes from the oncoming headlights. The driver parks directly behind the young woman’s Silverado, but leaves the engine running.
    The driver opens the door. Steps from the vehicle. Swings the door shut.
    “You’re late,” the young woman says, breaking her gaze from the girl, who is now staring out from behind the front seat.
    “Five hundred dollars surely bought me a few minutes,” the driver says, reaching up to remove her own hood. Wind lashes her black hair.
    “Wait,” the young woman says, eyebrows knit in confusion. “You’re a chick.” She looks again to the car. “You’re all chicks.”
    “Indeed,” the driver agrees.
    “Chicks don’t do this,” the young woman protests.
    “You certainly do.”
    “Cute. Look, I interviewed a Frankie.” 
    The driver raises her chin. “Francesca.”
    The last pigment bleeds from the west. “And these other bitches?”
    “They are here to witness,” the driver says.
    “Right,” the young woman says, taking one last pull off her cigarette. She flicks it—showers the dark with embers. Buries hands  inside pockets. “Well, I’m sorry they rode all the way out here, but you wasted everyone’s time. There ain’t fuck-all happening tonight.”
    “That remains to be seen,” the driver says.
    “Is that so?”
    “The longest way around is the shortest way home.”
    “Look, bitch. I’m freezing my tits off. I got better things to do than to stand here puzzling over some bullshit.”
    “But that’s exactly what you’ll do,” the driver says. “I’’ve already paid you five hundred dollars and have agreed to imburse you five hundred more. I intend to spend each and every cent. And for the record, my tits are just as cold as yours.”
    The two women stare at one another. Inside the grumbling automobile, the front seat passenger adjusts the volume on Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” The old woman’s arms plait the space above her head, an inscrutable conjuration.
    “Fine. Take your best shot.”
    “Yes, of course. But first, a proposition,” the driver says.
    “Fuck that—I was clear in the rules.”
    The driver offers both hands, palms forward. “This violates none of your edicts.”
    “Well?” the young woman asks after several empty seconds.
    “Your clothes.”
    “The fuck?”
    “I would very much like to wear your clothes.”
    “Umm—no thanks, Frank. Jesus Christ!” The young woman turns and reaches for her door handle.
    “One thousand dollars,” the driver says.
    Somewhere deep within the gloaming, a coyote yammers. But it too might be the wind keening intimation.
    “You’re serious,” the young woman says, turning again.
    “Must we not dare to be?” the driver asks, and the young woman frowns. Something has been proffered. But it is caught in the wind, which is high and cavils and leaves no space for memory.
    “I ain’t getting naked in front of her,” the young woman says instead, pointing a finger at the girl, still riveted in the backseat. She feels suddenly caught, a backyard possum under motion lights. Gilded in refuse.
    “You may retain your underthings—bra and panties,” the driver says. One corner of her mouth curls, revealing a dimple.
    They move to the space between the vehicles to undress, the young woman handing over each item of clothing only after the driver has carefully folded the preceding article upon the hood of her sedan. Gusts of wind blow grit from the tarmac. Soon, they face one another within the abrasive glare of headlights. At some point, the radio has been turned off. Inside, the three occupants look out upon them.
    “You are immaculate,” the driver says, buttoning the young woman’s jeans. “Why do you insist on doing this?”
    “This from the bitch who’s shelled out two thousand dollars,” the young woman says. She holds herself by the elbows, shivering.
    “Insightful.”
    “Let’s just get to it,” the young woman says.
    The girl rolls her window down and climbs onto the roof of the car. 
    “Hello,” she says. She has a sucker in her mouth now, and rolls it from cheek to cheek with her tongue.
    “Hi,” the young woman says.
    “I like your socks,” the girl says.
    “Thanks.”
    “Do you want a Tootsie Pop?”
    “Can you please tell her to get back inside,” the young woman asks the driver, who is just finishing pulling on the leather jacket.
    “If you wish her to go inside, you are perfectly capable of asking her yourself,” the driver says. She pulls the sweatshirt cowl from underneath and adjusts the jacket.
    “Can I ask you something,” the girl says to the young woman.
    They stare at one another until the young woman shrugs.
    “Why is there an Indian shooting his bow and arrow at a star?” the girl asks.
    “Excuse me?”
    “On the wrapper.” The girl holds a red Tootsie Pop wrapper out to the young woman. “Nonna says they used to give you a free  sucker if your wrapper had an Indian shooting the star, but when we stopped for gas tonight, I asked and the man said he didn’t  know anything about that.”
    “Neither do I,” the young woman says.
  “Weird,” the girl says. “Well, good night.” She climbs back into the sedan and rolls the window back up.
    The young woman turns back to the driver, whose open hand already flashes in an arc toward her ear. The world is blank except for the lonesome droning of wind coming off the plains.
                                                                                                     ..
    She is warm. The truck’s fan rattles as it pushes hot air into the cabin. The radio is set to an AM station, and a man speaks of morning livestock prices. The young woman is lying across the bench, still clad in socks and underwear. She sits up. Puts fingers to her ear and gingerly feels along her cheek. There is a paper grocery bag next to the passenger door. Inside, folded neatly, are her jeans, sweatshirt, and jacket. There is also an envelope containing fifteen hundred dollars. She looks around the parking lot.        Empty. She is reaching for the shift lever when she notices something red flapping beneath a wiper blade. She rolls down the window and reaches around the glass. She grips the steering wheel with her right hand and must lift her bottom from the seat, but she succeeds in trapping the paper between two fingers. She brings the wrapper inside.
    “Check the glove compartment,” is written in a girl’s looping script on the back of the wrapper. “And check the other side of this wrapper!” The young woman turns it over; there is an Indian shooting his bow. The star sits along an edge, cut in half at the factory. Inside the glove compartment, the young woman finds a red Tootsie Pop. She twirls it between her palms before unwrapping it. Sure enough, there is more of the girl’s handwriting: “Try to love the one you’re in.” The young woman flips the wrapper over. There is no Indian, but she does find the other half of a star.
    After a long while, she puts the sucker in her mouth and pulls out onto the highway. She drives toward Laramie, morning wind making easy work of her dust. And of the two wrappers she crumples and tosses out her window.

Gina Marie Bernard lives in Bemidji, Minnesota. Her daughters, Maddie and Parker, share her heart. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best Micro-Fictions, and the Pushcart. She is completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas, Monticello.

CONTENTS

KEEP READING >