In the Slipstream by Sarah Lynn Hurd

We filled our arms with cool bottles of syrupy soda, strawberry licorice, peanut butter crackers, crinkle-cut potato chips—as much as we could carry. Throwing our heads back under the fluorescent lighting, we knocked into each other with our hips, told each other to fuck off, that’s not what I said!

It was the summer after college and we were in love—all six of us—with ourselves, with each other, with the expanse of life we couldn’t yet see the horizon of.

Out by the pump, a quarter into our twelve-hundred-mile journey, we filled our tank. A borrowed red minivan, the smooth bullet, and a box of old CDs were all we needed to get us to the Atlantic. We’d left after dark, trickling into the van one-by-one from our closing shifts: one cashier, two baristas, three bartenders dotted across our little city.

On the road again—what’s that blinking light? We pulled into a Walmart parking lot and huddled around the dash to survey the flickering engine symbol. My dad’s gonna kill me.

I’m sure it’s fine. Hands on hips, we peered beneath the hood. I don’t know, we should probably get it looked at. We took a vote, the skeptics winning, and pulled into a mechanic after hours. We’d have to check back in the morning.      

In the Motel 6 parking lot across the street, we threw out rock, paper, and scissors to decide who’d play Mom and Dad to rent the room. The rest of us smoked Camels on the sidewalk, sitting on our luggage in the red exit-sign glow while we waited. 

They only had one vacancy, but we got a king. We hurried down the back hall, giggled whispers echoing along orange painted walls as we filed into our room. 

Sipping cherry Burnett’s and orange juice, we muffled our laughter, stretched out long on the bed. We let dreams fall from our mouths like wishing stones for each other to catch. As we slept, six pairs of arms wove with six pairs of legs like a neatly latticed pie, hot breath on each other’s necks. 

We didn’t yet know that the following summer, six would become five as one of us dove into Lake Superior and never resurfaced.

In another year, those remaining would split up, moving to Chicago and Seattle and back home with our parents. We’d find new friends and lovers—two of us would get married, and then divorced.

We’d become teachers, architects, banquet chefs, and civil engineers, drifting apart and back together like lily pads on the edge of a river until we all became just a friend from college, floating downstream.

We slept soundly.

When the sun rose, peeking through gaps in cheap polyester curtains, we slowly unraveled from one another. We rubbed sand from our eyes and wet our tongues with remnants of orange juice from the night before.

Fifty dollars later with a professionally tightened fuel cap, we drove toward the ocean, windows rolled down, hands gliding up and down through the slipstream.   

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SARAH LYNN HURD — Sarah is a writer and poet living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her writing appears in New Flash Fiction Review, Fractured Lit, trampset, Anti-Heroin Chic, and elsewhere. Her work often explores grief, nostalgia, womanhood, and self-perception. She has a BA in creative writing and English literature from Grand Valley State University.

KEELY HONEYWELL — Keely is a designer and artist who lives in the Pacific Northwest. She enjoys making art for books, periodicals, and other venues. Her website is at keelyhoneywell.myportfolio.com.