The solitude of a small red car

 

“The lighted changed; she turned onto the highway and was free of the city. No one, she thought, can catch me now; they don’t even know which way I am going.” — Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House ^[1]Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House, Penguin Random House, 1959/2009, p. 16.

Without a second thought she turns and leaves her cigarette smoking in the ashtray.   
Another disastrous day threatening to unravel, desperately holding itself together ever so slightly at the seam.  
“Fuck that,” she whispers and grabs hold of hers in the solitude of a small red car on a dark highway.  

Before she goes, her shaking hand applies black mascara and blue eyeshadow from a well-used mirror cache.   
Whose face it is staring back she can’t be sure, but she laughs anyway at the stranger’s clotted self-esteem.   
Without a second thought she turns and leaves her cigarette smoking in the ashtray. 

And then, she quietly drains her cup of blue stars (she is a nice girl, sugar and spice, after all isn’t she?) and her mother’s words soften in decay .   
Snap, snap, snap the sentences go and slide smoothly into the slipstream.
At long last her solitude begins, strapped into the seat of small red car on a dark highway.  

She swears, seven weeks ago, she would never have dreamed of tearing up the road with words like this on a Friday.   
Everything looks different now that her mind is wide awake behind the paternally gifted wheel of a 1969 (or was it a 1970?) TR6 melting like ice cream.
Without a second thought she turns and leaves her cigarette smoking in the ashtray.  

“What is it to live and love because, through and with words in the world as a woman?” She wonders as paragraphs written there and then flash by in a here and now replay.
All she knows, is that she has made a great try for it, thinking only of the jump and not bothering to look right or left into well-worn epistemes.  
he nods, yes—here outside; this is where it begins in the solitude of a small red car on a dark highway.  

There is so much of everyone she loves in the pages of her work, the ones she rejoices with each may day.
Revolving and eruptive rooms of her own have always sustained the heart of her reading and writing scheme.  
So, without a second thought she turns and leaves her cigarette smoking in the ashtray. And ends seated in the solitude of a small red car on a dark highway. ^[2]My first post for 2025 was written at fast speed as I was racing towards the deadline for my new bookHow feminist Writing Shapes Personal and Political Narratives: Odd Shoes and Other Essays. This is … Continue reading