Destination
I opened my eyes. I was in a car. I looked ahead. We were on a deserted highway headed to nothing and nowhere. I pressed my feet against the back of the passenger side chair and leaned back against my seat trying to clear my head. There were two men in the car with me. I did not know their names. I did not recognize their features or their voices. They didn’t seem to realize I was there. I didn’t see any insignias for car brands but I saw a Dasani water bottle on the seat to my left. I realized my throat was dry so I cracked the seal and guzzled down half the water.
The men were talking. I couldn’t hear them. Their voices seemed distant. I was just inches away from each of them but I felt completely separated from these two men who were in this car with me headed to who knows where.
“And then she saw him again.” The passenger had spoken and these words drifted into the cloudiness surrounding my mind. “I found her talking to him, and he was paying her money! I wonder how many times she cheated. How could she do this to me and the kids? So that’s why I did it.”
“Yeah, she was a whore, she deserved it.”
“A pretty whore. She’s not pretty anymore, though. Serves her right.”
I sat up. I tried to make out the features of the men from their back and side profiles. The passenger had the confederate flag shaved into the back of his neck, and the driver had rings on every one of his fingers except one, the left pinky finger was just a nub. I felt something shift and I watched the back of the passenger’s neck get thicker as he continued to describe everything he did to his girlfriend. He made his kids watch him kill her.
His neck continued to expand and the skin started to slump down over his shoulders. I noticed that his shoulders were getting broader too.
“Yo, I gotta tell you this story about this chick man! Her kid was psycho!” The driver banged his hands on the wheel, “We were going, you know? I gave her cigarettes, I paid for her ridiculous outfits, her stupid lip injections. And one night she comes over to the motel with a kid. She shoves ‘im in my room, and she says, ‘Donny, my husband is coming home tonight and I told him we was gonna celebrate our anniversary so I told him Angelo had a place to stay. Please take him, just for tonight, I’ll pick ‘im up in the morning.’ So I says, okay, fine, alright, but when you gonna leave Mista Briefcase the property lawya? And she slams the door in my face.”
I watched the driver’s hands start growing, turning into stiff meaty paws. His ears tripled in size and his head started to sweat. The passenger’s skin was stuck to the glass of the window now and it kept growing.
“So the kid, the first thing he says to me, you won’t believe this, the first thing he says to me is ‘You are not my dad.’ So I’m like of course I’m not your dad, but I’m sleeping with your mom and paying for your toys! Kid goes, ‘I’m not staying.’ So you know what I did next, Randy? I showed ‘im the door. Kid slept outside that night.”
“You a genius, Donny!” Randy leaned his head back and let out a laugh from lungs filled with decades of cigarette smoke. I watched a tooth shoot out of his mouth and get stuck in the ceiling of the car. When Randy laughed he leaned back in his chair and his weight caused it to recline, and I watched the fat on his hips spill over the seat as he continued laugh-coughing.
“My girl comes back next mornin,’ right? So she takes the kid and says we’re ova. So I says okay, but you promised you’d pay me back!” At this, Donny starts howling and slapping at the dashboard along with Randy and I’m watching their bodies morph into grotesque pieces of stretchy skin and fat. Their skin is rubbing against one another and taking up most of the space in the car, spilling into the backseat. They just keep talking and they keep getting bigger and bigger. I start yelling at them to shut up, to stop the car, anything, but they can’t hear me. I climb into the trunk and bang on the door, kick at it, trying to get it open as their skin pools around me. I feel my face press against the glass of the back windshield as the skin consumes, all the while hearing the two men laughing their bodies to death. I take my final breath and then my world goes dark.
