The yellow pump icon had been on for miles. I cradled the bottle of Reyka in the crook of my arm.
Two women stood outside the liquor store, comparing their lottery tickets.
“Ya know, we spent forty-two dollars on these things today.”
“Suckers,” I said, just loud enough to feel it.
I slipped into the Outback, the seat giving the way it always did. Checked the mirror. She scratched, flakes blowing back into her face.
Fuck one-in-a-million odds—unless it’s something bad. Then I don’t miss. Never have.
Skeeter Davis came on, singing about the end of the world. When I was a kid, that song meant my parents were gone and I was still here.
Now they are gone.
The song still plays.
The gas light was still on. I’d gotten used to it—how long you could drive before something gave out. How far you could push it.
The low glow of mortality—ignored, familiar, inevitable.
Patrick Carella is a former advertising creative director and School of Visual Arts instructor whose fiction, creative nonfiction, and humor have appeared or are forthcoming in Hobart, BULL, JMWW, The Hooghly Review, Eunoia Review, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, CaféLit, Gorko Gazette, Wicked Shadow Press, and other journals. He lives in New York's Hudson Valley.
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