Roadkill

by Ava Campbell

I tap the steering wheel to the tune of sirens. They wail in the morning air, rattling shutters and sticking to pavement like molten gum. The sun-warmed car bakes my skin and tacks it to the leather seats. You died a week ago.

You were young, but years of burnt-out children sunk bitter wrinkles into your skin and aged you. David’s pills and my inability to hold a job gave you a stroke. The doctors said it was a blocked artery, but we know the truth. I bet you died blaming us. You lived doing the same.

Right now, you sit in the backseat; ashes scraped from the bottom of a cremation tray into the cheapest urn I could buy. Well, second cheapest. I didn’t want to seem too cruel by putting you in brass.

Before the mortician incinerated you, I drove up to confirm your body was yours. David wouldn’t answer his phone, even when the hospital left voicemails. They called me during a pottery class, my hands sticky with a malformed vase I was trying to save. The instructor pronounced it vahz, the European way. His curdled tongue, a smoker like you, caressed the sound. I tried to control my face—my fahz—but I think he saw. I don’t know if I’m going back anyway. My therapist is full of shit about the healing power of pottery.

The doctors warned me that you’d look terrible, but I had to peel the skin from my lip to keep myself from smiling when I saw you. You’d been dead a couple hours, your skin painted like a wax figure. I bet I could’ve found a lip color that would’ve suited you more. You’ve never been a plum.

That night, I dreamed about pressing my finger into your cheek and digging a hole through your tongue. When I tried to pull it out, your jaw snapped shut, trapping my finger between your molars. Your eyelids peeled over, sockets pulsing. In the morning, I drove to the hospital to see if they’d taken your eyes, but you were on your way to the crematorium.

It took you three hours and fifty-three minutes to burn. Maybe less, accounting for the time it took you to be ground and scraped into the urn. I sat in the waiting room, watching a tiny fountain bubble frothy water. I looked at the cremation crystals (that’s where they make you into a nice amber or emerald-colored gem) but decided it was more than you were worth.

A week before this, before sitting in the waiting room as you were roasted next door, I visited you. You wouldn’t open the screen door. You yelled, spit puddling in the mesh, while fat horseflies scuffled along the frame. It was something about David, and how he’d lost another job—like sister, like brother—but I didn’t look at you. I closed my eyes, the sun hot against my eyelids, and wondered what it would be like to be back in the womb. Not yours. I’d like to try my own and see if I come out any better. Yours might’ve been rotten.

The curtains of David’s apartment rustle. It’s been ten minutes since I pulled up. He’s probably been waiting on the couch, twisting the watch around his wrist, hoping I’d drove away. I turn up the radio so I don’t have to look at him. It fizzles with static and the remnants of an old country song.

He slips out the door, catching on the knob to keep me from peering inside. He shuffles the keys in a greeting and shrinks down the drive. He’s sticky in the morning light, his cropped hair pale. His skin sinks into his skull, carving shadows into his cheeks. He looks like Dad, though you’d tried your hardest to make him all you.

He wears cargo pants, the kind bought in bulk. I bought him jeans a year or two ago for his birthday, but he never wore them. Last time I stopped by his apartment, I searched his drawers for them, smoking the cigarette I’d confiscated from him. It burned away before I found them at the bottom of the closet, tag protruding from the waistband.

“Morning, Davey,” I say through the open window. “Good day for therapy.”

“Let me walk,” he says.

“It’s seven miles,” I say, reaching over to open the door for him. “You wouldn’t want to be tired when you’re telling Dr. Hamlin all about me.”

He steps into the car. The sting of smoke trails him and snaps against my face when he shuts the door. I hate the mixture of gasoline and nicotine, which is why I don’t smoke in the car. Also, the reason I didn’t want to drive David around. But being dead meant you couldn’t do it anymore.

David twists to look at you. You’re in a nice, polished aluminum urn. Comfortable and strapped in by the seatbelt. He picks at the door handle as he watches you.

“Mom doesn’t like sitting in the backseat.” His slow voice crackles.

I roll my shoulders. They ache as I try to settle them.

“You don’t like to either,” I say.

“I don’t need you to tell me what I like and don’t like,” he says.

Dried blood crusts beneath his nose, mixing with the energy drink stain on his upper lip. It contorts as he frowns.

“She’s dead,” I say. “I don’t think she minds.”

He turns and presses his knees against the door. It creaks, filling the sharp air. I’ve messed up, but there are twenty minutes to Dr. Hamlin’s office. Twenty minutes to get us back on track. I think you’re laughing at me, but when I turn to check, you’re still dead.

I pull into the street. Morning traffic slides past the windows. It clears when we reach the highway.

David rifles through the center console. I put a couple pens in there to get him to quit smoking. He said it was worse in cars: the itch to smoke made his head thrum and his neck sweat. It was worse in every situation that benefited him. He hasn’t quit because he likes the excuse of a smoke break too much to give up. I smoke because I’m not an addict.

When we were young, he wanted to be a tattoo artist. When you sent us to the backyard, the porch light flickering as moths fluttered over the bulb, he brought the four-pack of markers I’d lifted from the gas station. We sat among the apricot trees as he dotted the felt tips against my skin. By the time you went to bed, I had a full sleeve.

In the mornings, you’d wake up and find my arm smeared, ink fighting the sheets. No matter how much bleach you used, it wouldn’t come out of the fabric. When I moved out, we’d forgotten which color they were supposed to be.

David’s hand drifts towards the seat between his legs, dragging ink against the leather. The pen stumbles over the wear like the markers had over my skinned knees. I pretend not to notice. The ink comes out when I use window cleaner.

The lid of your urn rattles as we pass over uneven asphalt. The lane markers shudder over cracks in front of me, sprawling for miles ahead. I lift a hand to scratch at my ear. My lobe stings as my fingernail scrapes the unhealed piercing. My therapist says it could be my depression that’s never healed the wound, but I think it was you. You stuck my head over the kitchen sink and used your sewing kit needles and Grandma’s pearl earrings. Maybe you were checking to see if the gold was real or not.

The steering wheel veers to the left. I press my foot against the gas. My shoulder bumps the door as we jerk sideways.

“Don’t,” David says.

“I’m only kidding.” I spare a look at him. He’s got a notch between his brows like he wants a smoke. “There’s no one on the road anyway.”

He chews his lip, pulling the scabbed edges with his teeth until they peel. Blood pools at the crease of his mouth. I let off the gas.

You laughed, a cruel leak of tears, when I moved to Phoenix. David walked to meetings and therapy and the corner store for a week until you realized I wasn’t coming back. Then you called every hour for three days until my voicemail box filled. Then I visited and you wouldn’t let me in. Then you died.

You smile at me from the picture taped inside the sun visor. You didn’t know what to do with him either, but I’d been the one to leave. To you, that was the biggest betrayal since I sold your wedding ring at the pawnshop for a new pair of sneakers.

I found it in your jewelry box among the other junk. Our baby teeth weren’t worth anything, even if you promised you’d shove them back into our mouths and call a circus to hand them some Kid Freaks With Too Many Teeth.

“You passed the exit,” David says.

“I think we should quit therapy,” I say. 

“We need it,” he says.

Is he thinking about you, too? You made him dependent and docile, like a skittish dog. I bet he doesn’t know where to go now, his leash unchained from the fence.

“That’s what they’ve conditioned us to think,” I say. “We had a bad childhood and therefore need therapy. But I think we can do just fine on our own.”

“You always do this,” David says.

I smile at him, but he won’t look at me. “Do what, Davey?”

“Think you’re having some sort of revelation and stop therapy,” he says. “You got put away last time.”

I was seventeen and you hadn’t been home all week. You left a piece of casserole in your room, but we couldn’t get to it because you kept your door locked. A fox scratched at the window all night. The smell seeped beneath the door and hung in the hallway.

Thursday night and David thought I had done something to make you leave. Said he’d be happy if I left so you two could finally get some peace. Did you teach him to say things like that? In your efforts to distance us from Dad, you made him too much like you. Maybe you made me too much like you. You always took threats too far. So that’s what I did.

“Mom put me away,” I say.

“Only because you made her,” he says.

We slide by a sign that says Tusayan, 60 mi. I roll down the window. The sharpness of pine slips through the car, snapping against my face. You’re laughing again. I wonder how long you’ve been inside my head. If you’ve always been there.

“I had to clean it,” he says. “She couldn’t go in.”

“She never cleaned up her messes,” I say.

“Don’t blame you on her,” he says.

You got called into the office when I was eight. I’d convinced the girls in my class to start a nail-painting business. I didn’t have any polish, you hated the smell, so the other girls brought theirs. At lunch, we laid the colors out and charged twenty-five cents a nail. The teacher caught us fifteen minutes in.

The principal asked you to come because I was the leader—those girls were snitches—and it wasn’t my first time organizing them. The teacher busted our makeup/spa shop a month before.

Your hand, cold like it had been when I touched your body in the hospital, wrapped around my fingers. You listened to the principal, mouth twitching and tongue grinding the cold sore on the inside of your cheek. My wrist ached as your mood rings pressed against my knuckles. Carmine, tangerine, garnet. Those meant mad, mad.

In the parking lot, we knelt by your car as you scraped the polish from my nails with your keys. The teeth peeled the skin from my fingers. My blood, ruby (mad, mad), mixed with the indigo flakes.

As you brushed the pebbled tears from my eyes you said, Don’t blame me.

“There’s no other way,” I say. David is pressing the pen tip into his wrist, and I pull it away from his skin. The ink makes him itch, like he needs to abrade it from his skin like you used to with the rough side of a sponge until he bled.  “How could I be this way if it wasn’t for her?”

He caps the pens and sets them in the center console. They fall into crumpled receipts and my high school speeding tickets.

Dad left when we were young. David didn’t remember much about him except for the poison you leeched into our brains, the kinds about deadbeat fathers who hated their children so much they had to get out. Your dad would’ve been so proud, you’d say after we did something you hated. He was awful, too. So selfish. I didn’t know much more either, but I tasted your hate in the smoke when you burned anything he left behind.

He’d packed his clothes into your ‘76 Cadillac and you cried because you’d been waiting for him to marry you and you’d already had two kids and now you didn’t have a car or a husband. Just me and David who always looked more like Dad than like you. You’d given him your youth and your body in exchange for us, which wasn’t the reward he’d promised you it would be. Bye-bye, you’d yelled, angry at yourself and me and David watching from the front window. You’ll regret it when we don’t let you back in the door. The front door stayed locked, even years after we realized he’d left you for good.

Bye-bye, you said, like it would hurt more, as I slipped into my car and stumbled into the street. Bags packed and leaving David behind, who was too young and too dependent to abandon you like he should’ve. You’re hurting me just like Dad, you’d say. Do you want me to suffer just like he wanted?

A thrum begins below the car. David leans forward to check the side mirror. The car slides sideways when I take my hand off the wheel. He presses the emergency lights and I pull over.

David is the first out of the car. He wraps his arms around himself, like he needs protection from me. The back right tire puddles on the road. There’s a flattened squirrel grated into the asphalt near the front bumper, fur brittled from the sun.

David pulls a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and lights one. His thumb shudders over the button, skidding against it until the sparks catch. He snaps away when I grab for it, my nails catching on his collar.

“I thought you quit,” I say, though we both know that’s not the truth.

“It’s just the one,” he says, though we both know it’s a lie.

“You’re going to kill yourself,” I say, leaning back against the car, my shoulder blade pressing into the window frame, “keeping up with things like that.”

“Let go,” David said, shooting smoke into the air between us. “You’re holding on to things that just don’t matter.”

“Is that what Dr. Hamlin says?” I ask, tongue burning as it scrapes the back of my teeth. “That I’m the one ruining us?”

David rubbed his forehead, ash trailing down his temple. “You need to worry about what your therapist is saying. Not mine.”

“I told you I’m not going back.”

“Are you afraid she’s going to tell you it’s your fault?” he asks, snapping his teeth. “Are you going to cry when she tells you maybe mom wasn’t so fucked up, it was just you?”

I open my mouth to tell him to shut up, but my teeth gum like old rubber. My tongue doesn’t fit in my mouth and sags against my bottom lip. He slips the cigarette towards his lips again and I lunge for it, smacking it out of his hand. He trips back, fingers gliding to his face like I’d hit him. 

“She ruined us,” I say, stepping towards him as he steps back.

His sneakers scrape against the asphalt. His eyes dart towards the passing cars and back to me, like he could jump into one without grinding his skin into the road trying to run. The air smells of smoke, clouding the space between us like a gas. It congeals in the air.

“Yes,” David agrees. “But she can’t do that anymore.”

He doesn’t get it, not really. You’re always there, laughing and sneering and hurting. Maybe he doesn’t hear you, or maybe he doesn’t care, but I can’t scrape you from behind my eyelids no matter how many eyedrops I poison you with or how many hours I spend in my stilted therapist’s office.

“She’s loud,” I say, tugging at my ears again and hoping this time he gets it, like he used to when we were kids and counting the gaps between our teeth.

“She’s dead.”

A snap of heat tickles my back where I’m leaning against the car. I step away, pulling my arms to my body like it’s you biting. David steps beside me. The backseat of the car burns, his cigarette pooling in the leather seats. In the middle of the flame, you sit, smoke rising from the aluminum.

I reach for the door, to pull you out or smother the fire, but I don’t have anything on me to put it out. David doesn’t move, watching the flame with weary eyes, like you’d brought the devil into the backseat to mess with us.

We watch the seats burn, fire curling into the ceiling. The leather clots, the seatbelts fizzling as they smolder. The shudder of an engine fades as a car slips by. My fingers are numb and they buzz when I press a hand to my teeth.

“We should call for help,” he says, clothes shuffling as he searches his pockets. His breath rattles and feels like it’s pulling the hair off my arms.

“We don’t need any,” I say. “We’ll walk the rest of the way.”

We’d only passed the exit a mile ago. It wouldn’t take long to walk back. Or to catch a ride with someone going our way. David would only be a couple minutes late. Me, a couple weeks.

“Bye-bye,” I say to the urn.

“Bye-bye,” David echoes.

Inside, the urn melts, softening into the seat. 

Ava Campbell is a student from Arizona. She is a chemist and short story writer. Her work has been published in Grim & Gilded.