Imagining it Felt as Right as it Being There
She waited for the Iced Capp for thirty minutes before she sighed and walked out of the Tim Hortons even though she already paid for it. She got in her car and looked at the cup holder where her drink should have been. She should have been twiddling the straw in her fingers, but it had been a day for disappointment and imagining it felt as right as it being there.
A green Ford Taurus with paint peeling off its side tore past the entrance. Maddy pounded the brake and shook out a breath. It burned her nostrils. Her eyes fell to the peach pit she threw on the passenger side floor weeks ago and whispered, “I know this sounds crazy, but I think the world is trying to kill me. They didn’t give me my Iced Capp so I’d be distracted and get hit by that stupid car, but I’m on to them.”
She remembered biting into the peach in a rush between her first and second jobs. It hadn’t spoken to her then and it didn’t now.
The pink tree shaped air freshener fell from the rearview mirror and slapped her face on the way to the floor while she turned onto the street. “I’ll have to tie it back up when I get home,” she thought. Another car blared its horn.
Maddy tapped the radio button and the Jonas Brothers filled the air. “I’m a sucker for you,” they told her. But that wasn’t true. The radio was always lying to her. If it wasn’t a radio show host, or some musician, it was the words that came in between.
Her mouth was dry and Maddy clucked her tongue. She could use one of the white bars from the pill bottle in her purse, but it was in the back seat and she knew if she reached for it that would be when the world opened its mouth and swallowed her whole.
The 5 o’clock traffic dragged and she was stuck next to a park where people did yoga in the grass. No one seemed to be enjoying it. One man was bent into a pretzel. Maddy thought he was crying. “The world is a wild place,” she told the peach pit.
A fly landed on her check even though there hadn’t been one in the car before. She shrieked and swatted it away. Her strike missed the fly and hit her eye. It would bruise later. Her vision swam, the radio buzzed, the fly buzzed, a horn blared, the yoga man cried.
“The world is loud,” the peach pit said.
“Oh, shut up,” Maddy told the peach pit.
Benjamin Brindise is Buffalo-born and Nairobi-based. He is the author of the chapbook ROTTEN KID (Ghost City Press, 2017), the full length collection of poetry Those Who Favor Fire, Those Who Pray to Fire (with Justin Karcher, EMP Books, 2018), and the short fiction micro chap Secret Anniversaries (Ghost City Press, 2019). His poetry and fiction has been published widely online and in print including Maudlin House, Peach Mag, and The Marathon Literary Review. He tweets @benbrindise