Weekly Writing – July 15 2023

She drove as far as she could into the country with the radio and moon both buzzing in her head. When had there gotten to be so many lights?
More every month, it seemed like. There had been a time when she’d been able to just step out her front door.
She’d bought and fixed up that little tumbledown shack in the middle of nowhere for just that reason. Friends had asked why she didn’t keep animals, at least some chickens, if she was going to live out that far, but just imagining them shrieking and fluttering, the blood and feathers she might wake up to find…
She’d tried to live out where there was no one to keep pets or let their kids wander around at night. Now her hands were trembling on the wheel, and it was getting harder and harder to find a place far enough away from it all.
They would blame her, wouldn’t they? When there wasn’t anywhere left for her to get away. She had tried so damn hard, but now the sky was that liquid blue the moon would soar up into like a boat setting sail, and her nerves felt like nails jutting up every which way under her skin, and she had to stop, or she would end up in the ditch.
Pull over in the dark, keep the dome light off. Though that didn’t guarantee no one would come along to check, not anymore.
She shoved the door open with her shoulder. Tumbled from her seat onto the tiny jagged teeth of the gravel shoulder, on all fours, and that already felt more right than the jittery right angle she’d been sitting at.
She was already shaking as if her nerves were about to burst through. The teeth she clenched fit differently together, along their own jagged seam.
They would blame her if she ever found something to tear apart with them. Even though she’d tried so hard. Even though they were the ones who’d chased her out there into the middle of nowhere, with their porch lights and chained dogs, and all she’d wanted was a place where no one would hear when she threw her head back and howled at the first rising ripple of the moon.