Leonora’s Road Trip
by Leonora Desar
I hate road trips. I can’t drive so no one wants to go on one with me.
Leonora: hi, can I come on your road trip?
Maria: do you drive?
Leonora: no.
Maria: click.
Jon: what kind of road trip?
Leonora: you know, one where we all get in a car?
Jon: do you drive now?
Click.
I decided to go on one anyway. I would have a super awesome solo road trip.
I took the D train. Sometimes a road trip involves other things—like sacrifice. I thought, it’s happening. I looked out the window—and there it was. Not my road trip, but its beginning. I got out. I walked through Coney Island. I thought, all these people, they have no idea. I went to the bumper cars. I said, bumper car for one please. I feigned confidence. I was not a middle-aged woman. I was road mistress.
I drove. I tried not looking at all the kids. Then I did. If I didn’t that could be a bad thing—they’d say, why is she avoiding eye contact? Is she a pedophile? Mothers would get nervous. They’d run, which means I wouldn’t get my road trip, or I’d get a better one, with no kids.
I drove. I fiddled with the seatbelt. Then I said, screw seatbelts.
I rode without it. I didn’t have music but that was fine. I had my own music, an inner soundtrack. It sounded like—don't look at the kids the happy couples. I ignored it. I listened to something else—the seagulls. They too were singing. They said, Leonora, don’t look at the happy couples.
I tried remembering Beyoncé. I tapped my foot as if I were listening to her, which was the same. I said—I am the type of woman who goes on road trips where Beyoncé is playing and cool stuff is happening all around.
I shut my eyes. It was happening. I was on the road. The wind was in my hair. That’s what you always see on road trips—wind. That and a lot of sex. I pretended that was here too. It was happening, I was having sex with all my friends. We were doing it, pawing at each other’s boobs, or in Jon’s case, his cock. I said, wow, I never thought I’d see that. Yeah, he said, me too.
I touched it and didn’t laugh. I wanted to laugh. I thought it might make it better. We pretended to enjoy it and not be grossed out. It wasn’t gross, it was friendship. I imagined all that friendship, around me. I wasn’t in a bumper car, alone.
Leonora Desar's writing has appeared in places such as River Styx, Passages North, The Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review, and Columbia Journal, where she was chosen as a finalist by Ottessa Moshfegh. Her work has been selected for The Best Small Fictions 2019, the Wigleaf Top 50 (2019 and 2020), and Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020. She won third place in River Styx's 2018 microfiction contest, and was a runner-up/finalist in Quarter After Eight's Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest, judged by Stuart Dybek, and Crazyhorse’s Crazyshorts! contest. She is fiction editor of Pidgeonholes.
