late lift offs

 

There is ecstasy in paying attention. There is also salvation. She hadn’t expected the drug to come on so strong, so quickly. Past the point of remarking on it, past the point of asking someone else to drive, but honestly, she couldn’t have let any of these mongrels take the wheel. She knew her friends hadn’t really turned into dogs but Baker was a much better looking Collie than he was a human, sitting at alert in the passenger seat, his pink tongue hanging out of his mouth. 

Thank god for standstill traffic. Her plan was to drift along, focusing intently on the triple rubies of the taillights of the vehicle ahead of them until the road widened enough for her to slide over onto the shoulder and wait it out. Climb over the guardrail and puke. Sit in the tall grass and trash until she felt better. For now, focusing on the mechanics of staying upright in the seat and keeping the car in the lane was all she could manage. 

Air, she needed air, and she hit the button that rolled down all the windows simultaneously. There was no grumbling from the pack. In fact, they all crowded to their open windows as hungrily as she did. Was the radio on? No. The brothers were humming in almost harmony. Some Loggins and Messina number she didn’t know the name of. Robert had perfect pitch but his twin staggered along, not quite hitting the right notes, but never embarrassed about it. She wanted to look in the rearview or turn around to see what kind of dogs the twins were, but the lights in front of her were stuttering on and off. Something was happening, and she took her foot off the brake but didn’t touch the gas just yet. Too soon. The slow roll of only a few yards gave her a wave of nausea. Those fucking green grapes they’d tossed at each other in the parking lot while they wandered looking for the car in a sea of others. 

A white car slowly oozed into her shattered left peripheral vision. Big, boxy. Late 70s.The exhaust loud, but clean. She couldn’t see inside the windows were tinted so dark. Her foot back on the brake, the white car slid by her in inches revealing the telltale slant of shackles lifting the rear of the car almost a foot higher than the front. Dude fancied himself a drag racer. As it pulled abreast of her car, the jewels in front of her jittered to life. Move now, another car length, then stop. 

She looked over, leaning for clean air and finding only raw, over-fed exhaust fumes. Baker started barking and jumped up to lean further out his window. While she groped for the collar that wasn’t there, the cars in front of her slid under the light as yellow blinked red. The dogs all rushed to growl at the white car as it strolled to a stop alongside her, and the driver issued the challenge with one short, arrogant roar. While he was waiting for the red light to go green, she was perfectly willing to hit the gas when it turned blue. Now!