She asked you for a story, “What’s the point of a road trip other than that?”

You smiled, already familiar with her non-linear flow of thought. You apologized in a tolerant way, a combination you didn’t know existing before you met her, “I cannot think of any story.”

“Now you are just being impossible,” she chided.

“You speak in story as if it is practically your mother tongue, so please stop poking fun at your unimaginative partner.”

“Nathaniel,” she laughed hysterically and looked away. You could sense her dimples deepening without looking at her, and when you did you saw lemon soda stains on her cheeks and chin, a sticky moon-shaped membrane around her lips glistening in the sunlight.

Your car sped by an old and dusty road. It was burning outside you could nearly hear the squeak of asphalt as your wheels rolled over it. The AC was probably malfunctioning, as it was clearly not cool enough inside, but neither of you suggested to roll down the windows.

“I have loved the idea of proper nouns,” she said, out of the blue. “I like the sound of them. When I install them in a daily dialogue, the dialogue itself sounds foreign, at least distant.”

“I don’t quite get your point.”

“Well, you should,” she snapped, “Waterloo Sunset is definitely better than a random sunset.” She then darted out her tongue several times, seemingly weighing different nouns’ combinations and their textures, as she would put it. For a split-second you did feel her to be foreign and distant, not only this dialogue.

She looked outside the window. You were in the midst of a typical wasteland, in which sands and shrubs routinely distributed. There certainly wasn’t any proper noun she adored to address your whereabouts. After all, what came in pair with randomness? You cracked into a smile at the thought about things like “Trafalgar randomness”, realizing that you were infected by her whims.

She raised her hand to poke at the radio. When she did so, the fake gem bracelet on her wrist reflected the sunlight in a way that only metals were known capable of. The boombox creaked something of The Smiths, and you felt her gaseous gaze on your right arm.

You followed her gaze and saw irregular stripes of light dancing on your upper arm, and you saw her rotating her wrist, all the while staring at the optic wonder she created. Your skin felt singed but you let her.

“Have you ever thought there is a higher being up there?” She suddenly gestured upwards. The stream of light swept past your eyelids, breaking you out of the trance.
You meant to say “come on” but she seemed serious.

“Sometimes I can’t help thinking there is someone or something in a higher dimension with a torchlight. We are so easily swept by the alteration of triumphs and adversities, but it may all be streaks of light or spots of darkness on a wide sheet of paper. His turning on or off the torch constitutes our lives.” She stared at the root of her left palm with a strange dedication of a squirrel in the face of a walnut.

You trembled at the thought of it. All of a sudden you felt you were stuck in a dent of a walnut, closely speculated by an eye of a huge rodent.

“I disturbed you,” she observed.

You wanted to give a dismissive wave or to nod. You did neither.

“Forgive me if I did,” she went on quietly, “but there’s got to be an answer.”

“An answer for what?” You swallowed.

“There is something missing, don’t you reckon?” She said while biting her thumb nail. “One will at least feel a little bizarre when he wakes up and finds he is one kidney short. One day I woke up and found there was no marmalade in the fridge. That was the first sign of it crashing all down. As we talk there are meteor rains and missiles striking distant continents and legislation is being made elsewhere mistaking deer for horse and homosexuality for pedophilia outside our window.”

“Wait,” you were baffled by her senseless mumbling, “what you mean is there’s no longer peace and tolerance…”

“And marmalade,” she stressed.

“One would think your higher being has lost the ‘A’ on its keyboard,” you commented, trying to adapt to her style.

Her lips quirked but she seemed sad, melancholic in a mature rather than whimsical way. “But there is still war and awful music and psychopathic assassins at our tail. Nathaniel, not everything can be explained in a single formula.”

Morrissey slurred about dead queens and DJs in the beat of the drums. You looked beyond the windshield and saw the sun setting in a sick reddish halo. You heard her feet dragging across the carpet. The dregs of your chips and Doritos and the soda cans shuffled.

“The car is creaking,” she said, “and even without my feet pressing down to it I can hear the creak. I don’t know… Do you have the feeling that a creaking floor is anticipating your feet?”

Yes, you thought. You were constantly aware of a void in your heart and a gap in your story arc. Being in existence to you was like walking around a house with that creaky floor, ready to bring itself in contact with your foot. When she sensed something wrong with the world you felt something wrong with yourself.
But you were not sure if that was what she meant.

In the end you just said, “it’s raining.”

She laughed as if at last you said something right and beautiful. She laughed and you were ever so conscious of her knuckles dragging along your spine, resting at the small of your back where they would remain for the remainder of the night. The window pane rattled against the heavy rain, which may not be a rain after all. Maybe the psychopathic killers bred by her paranoia had finally approached your dilapidated vehicle. Maybe she had been right all along, that the rattles were just the clatter of keyboard, that you were but fictional subjects of a minor scheme which would soon be revised, truncated or deleted. Or maybe, you stared into the darkness outside and mused, there was a railway in the distance and a train had sped by.

You looked down at her who was already asleep. Her lower lip trembled; her cheap earring shook and clattered. With hindsight, you should have told her a story, maybe about a poor writer and a software engineer, and she could get to decide how the story ended.

For the first time in your journey you began to think how you got here. You tried hard to reminisce the road you had treaded. You realized you could not, and you cried. You cried but couldn’t utter a sound, like a character deprived of onomatopoeia in a failed fiction.