WHAT IS AND WHAT SHOULD NEVER BE — HARSIMRAN KAUR
/Drive through dark alleys. Go skinny-dipping in the lakes. Catch a beetle. Call it pretty. Pick stones. Call them gold. Throw your towel onto your bed. Speak gibberish to your mom when she calls you downstairs for dinner. Get away from her. Get into a random yellow pickup truck of a stranger. Look at his daughter's portrait on the dashboard of his truck. Call her pretty. Call everyone’s daughter pretty. Call everyone. Throw your phone away on the road. Let the ground catch all your vibrations and turn them into something peaceful. Blurt out the lyrics to your favorite Led Zeppelin song. Read all the road signs when you're in the middle of nowhere. Don't let the truckman poke fun at your face caked in sadness, sunburnt on asphalt.. Hear him talk about oil and grease and bones. Assure him you know what page he's on. Be his book.
Think.
Maybe the truckman will kill you in this one. Maybe you’ll be lost in the ether. Maybe the darkness will follow your trail after the sky turns into a salmon. You’ll be in a forest. He will slow down the truck. Ask you to open the car door and run the fuck away from him. You’ll pick up your face, wrinkled with a grin. Turn into a vagabond, which is to say fear.
Run.
The forest will be green. Your favorite color as a child was green. The forest will be silent. Your favorite sound as a child was silence. There. A tree house. Inside. Home. Warm. Doors locked. Fingers untouched, estranged in fear. When he'll be outside knocking on the door with an axe in his hand, you’ll hear voices circling your head. You’ll murmur Led Zeppelin for one last time until the door unlocks itself as a memory, placed neatly on the palm of your hand. An axe. Truckman. Silence. Trees.
Harsimran Kaur is a seventeen-year-old writer from Punjab, India. Her writing appears in Jellyfish Review, BULL, Parenthesis, Big Windows Review, KNACK, Milk Candy Review and elsewhere. She speaks four languages and loves clementines. Find her at harsimranwrites.com.
