Jamie Duncan by Aimee Parkison

There was one girl who used to love to hitch more than any other at my high school, Jamie Duncan. We were in the same class. This was a long, long time ago. We’re both old women now. Jamie loved truckers because her father was a trucker, and she idolized him. She wanted to marry a trucker, to be with truckers, to go out on the road.

Her father was angry when he found out she was hitching rides from truckers. She never knew why he threatened her, and she kept on, just not telling him.

We were seniors when she disappeared, just went out on the highway and never came back. I used to look for her everywhere I went, especially when traveling, even years after. For decades, I kept thinking I would run into her while traveling the highway, that we would cross paths at a truck stop or gas station or rest stop and just laugh.

Her father killed himself three years after she disappeared, stuck a shotgun in his mouth and used his big toe to pull the trigger.

I once thought I saw her on a roof of a motel along the highway, smoking a cigarette, in the low sun. It was another girl.

After I became a grandmother, I was dropping off old clothes at a church and saw a woman working in the charity closet, and I said, “Hey, Jamie? Is that you?”

She said she didn’t know anyone named Jamie, but I was sure she was lying. I kept coming back to that church, and she kept watching me.

“Where have you been?” I finally asked when she followed me into the kitchen of the church, where the preacher’s wife made coffee with reused coffee grounds that tasted of rust. “Why didn’t you come back home or at least get in touch with anyone? We were looking for you, people are still looking.”

She glared at the school ring I wore on a chain, and I recalled she used to wear one just like it when we went to school together. I wondered what happened to her ring, if she still had it.

“I need a cigarette,” she said. “Come on.”

I followed her out the back door, down an alley behind the church, and up a metal ladder to a fire escape to the roof of a bank, where she lit up a cigarette to smoke in the low sun. She smoked while gazing at the clouds in the distance, feather clouds on a bright blue sky, wispy white trails. I watched her blow smoke in the hot sun.

“Look at me,” I said, “why don’t you.”

She dropped her cigarette, charged at me, pushing and shoving so I almost went over the edge.

---

AIMEE PARKISON — Aimee is the author of several books, including Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. She is Professor of Fiction Writing at Oklahoma State University and serves on the FC2 Board of Directors.  Her fiction has appeared in Best Small Fictions and in literary journals such as Puerto Del Sol, Five Points, and North American Review. Her newest story collection, Suburban Death Project, was published by Unbound Edition. More information is available at www.aimeeparkison.com. 

Art by OLADOSU MICHAEL EMERALD — Oladosu (he/him) is an art editor at Surging Tide magazine, a poet, a writer, a digital/musical/visual artist, a photographer, a footballer, a boxer, and a political scientist. He is the author of A Step Beyond Failure and the poetry chapbook, Berceuse of Broken Pots. His work has been published or forthcoming in many magazines and has won numerous awards in writing and art. He’s a man who does not know how to give up, and art chose him before he existed. Say hi to him on Twitter @garricologist, and Instagram @emerald_arts1.