Late Night Drive

Flash Fiction #6 - this one goes out to NIKI, get that shit

She dared a glance at the mirror, at the blouse bleached white and a fine pale, paler than the ghosts curled at the corners of the glass, ghosts of days past, past trials, past festivities. All was massive, weighty, and lodged within her, down in those borderless depths with no name where heart and lungs ought to be. She was beautiful, of course, primped up in the way that others would define beautiful, but she held little interest in thinking of it for longer than her synaptic toll gates required, and even less interest in what others imagined that beauty to be. She saw herself good, and so she was. And if that were the only metric by which she measured herself, then perhaps her heart would not be so die-cast.

The music followed her down the elevator, out the penthouse suite and into the gleaming convertible, Porsche number, sleek red, capable of asphalt hell, but she preferred it to glide over the roads, under the constellations, amidst the reflections bawking and gasping in the city's glassy sheen. She set aside the hotel room key, puffed the black curls and let them wave in the wind, blackened strands swept by the squall of the night, all while she smiled at the gleaming city revealed to her in all its starlight, silver and sterling, the vainglory of sodium lost to time and legal provision. The neighborhood expanded, greeting her like a kind grandmother with mood and flourish and tomato stew, becoming and beautiful, building blocks assorted in phalanx allegiances, columns stacked like cement books at an urban library, her bare foot still pressed on the dash, and in these seconds there was something tangible, an experience to be grasped, smothered, enjoyed, wrestled with, every dusky taste and summery scent all at once scattershot in a roller coaster montage sequence of scarcely-lit photographs, capturing the minutes of minutiae, the small piecemeals of the time we have.

There were people by the sidewalk coming home from work, finishing their rounds of shopping, hobbling towards payphones where the light is dim and the voices crackle, and so sure they were of the moon and its regency, prettified progeny of Selene, nursed nephew to Nyx, glistening in its waxes and wanes as it smiled purely down onto the Earth below. She passed underneath wicker-standing street lamps and vaunted highways and down the long stretch to her destination and let home escape from her dog-pennel mind. She forgot about pastoral reclusiveness, about sheltered peace, about tranquil winds billowing down the pillars and tile of her marbled birthright. In the liminal space between this time and the next, she saw then what she did not see before, that even in this world of sin and sex and magic, you could snatch paradise from the jaws of hell.