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Fiction Short Story

by  David Pennington

Wind in the Window

State highways provide the best escape routes for leaving somewhere discreetly. These roads often cut across wide spans of farmland or desert, are rarely crowded, and at night they are cloaked by darkness. Cops are sparse, even during emergencies.

The cold night air attacks my arm, chaps the skin and cramps my forearm. The driver's side window is long gone, shattered in a million pieces between her father's driveway and the floorboard of my car. Wind whistles through the bullet hole in the rear window, and serves as his blessing to the announcement of our engagement. I glance at my fiancé's slumped head in the seat next to me. I can't tell if she's sleeping, daydreaming, or counting her toes for the thousandth time. Who can blame her? She's had a rough day. Hell, she's had a rough life.

We exited the highway hours ago. The asphalt's once polished black tar surface appears off-white in the light of my hi-beams. Faded yellow lines merge two lanes into one. Occasional pairs of skid marks streak across the road and offer enough contrast to keep my focus on driving. Still, my mind wanders as I wonder what made those marks. Maybe something fell off a truck and blocked the road, or a lit cigarette dropped from a driver's mouth, or someone punched a driver in the right eye. It swelled and blurred his vision. Maybe someone shoved that lit cigarette into a driver's young, creamy white thigh. I see the blister and scar. Perhaps hunger or fatigue caused a lapse in attention span. Something forced those drivers to hit the brakes and let luck take care of the rest.

The crisp air rushes through the broken window, but I feel warm. Beads of sweat form on the backs of my knees and trickle into my socks. My bride-to-be stirs in her seat. In one hand she holds up a shiny bullet discharged from her father's Thirty-aught Six. It smashed my window and nested in a small crater in the passenger door panel. "I'm going to make a necklace with this," she shouts. "Then it will always be there to remind us of how wonderfully disastrous this day has been." She fingers the bullet for a moment, and drops it in the ashtray. "Where are we?" she asks. Her words muffled by the wind blowing in the pane-less window.

"County route 46, almost to Iowa, I think."

Traveling at 60 miles an hour with an open window, it doesn't matter how loud someone talks, or what radio station is tuned in, all sounds garble in the roar of the wind as it rushes past the window. Move too fast and there's no need to speak. Move too slow and go nowhere.

She sits up, stretches her arms and presses her breasts against the teddy bear on her Grateful Dead T-shirt. My concentration drifts from the road to her feminine curves. Driving feels difficult. Is it my desire to draw her closer to me? Or could it be the thirteen hours I've been steering the wheel and stomping on the gas pedal? Either way, the thought of doing anything other than driving appeals to me at this point.

"That's a long way. I guess we aren't going to make it to Easter dinner tomorrow night. My family will be most disappointed." A faint light reflects off the dashboard and I see her lips pout before they break into a wide smile. "How did we get so lucky?"

Luck, that had to be it. Perhaps counting on luck is a dangerous way to live, but certainly no more dangerous than confessing to a drunken, pistol-popping, part-time postal employee one's plans to marry his daughter. I slam the brakes, spin the steering wheel, and floor the gas pedal. The rear wheels skid across the road and send the car in another direction as the wind continues to blow through the hole that is my window.


About the Author
David Pennington is a twenty-something college student living in the frozen tundra that is eastern Colorado. David is completely broke, so the girls he takes on dates are quite surprised when they end up at. . . the library?