It was a beach town in February. What can I say? There was nothing to do but get out of town. The General Store was out of stock on beach towels, would probably sell you a boogie board cheap. They had ice cream though. The beer was flat at the pizza joint everyone stops at on the way out of town. The stoned kids in the center table, I couldn’t believe they were old enough to drink. I couldn’t believe I noticed. I even found myself looking at the dollar bills stapled to the two by four walls with notes around the bar and plastic-wrapped screen porch, reading the notes people had written on them. I felt like a tourist. You know the place. A sign on the wall under the clock says: If you got somewhere to be then why are you here?
A flashback to a sun-bleached woman, flushed with tequila at the same bar one night last week. I was underwater in my cups and I actually tried to tell her I was a writer and that I wanted to use her in a scene for a novel I was working on. She took me home to her one bedroom apartment, and we fucked standing in her kitchenette, then again later in her shower.
I shook off the memory, partial as it was. I had them wrap half of my slice and killed the flat draft beer down to the plastic bottom.
At the edge of town, I stuck my thumb up and waited. Saw the ghost of my father or maybe myself in some alternative future, yelling at his children to get out of the minivan. His wife was the last person in the world I expected to offer me a hit off their dugout and a cup of coffee while I waited to get picked up, but she said she had been there before, and the way she said it, I guess she had. She laughed awkwardly about the last thing she had said, but I couldn’t hear for the traffic and the wind coming off the marsh. The sun just over the trees, I was quickly losing light. Still, I packed the one-hitter a second time, looking both ways for highway patrol. As she said goodbye, walked away, my old man was standing on the porch of the condo someone had loaned them for the price of the cleaning here in a tourist trap in winter. I could barely make out his face, he had no expression anyway, but he waved, and what the hell, I waved back.
Where was I going?
The streetlights came on. The white sun sinking out beyond the marsh, then sunk. A pair of taillights flash, embers in a dying fire.
Where else, but west.
