In the Back

Mina Ramirez

The desert was closed. A coyote’s soft paws spelled out “locals only” in the dirt. There was no sand in this desert. A shallow sea of stones stretched for miles, and between them small, hardy plants had crept and struggled out into the predawn air. Their fronds and pads and thorns were speaking all the time. Sunlight was an hour away.

Across the expanse of desert in a thin, mostly straight line ran a road, two lanes of asphalt grinding against one another. The road was regularly traversed and occasionally crossed at odd hours by the locals: horny toads, king snakes, jackrabbits, crows, legions of ants and beetles. Some nights prior a fox, constantly throwing sharp looks over its shoulder, had taken nine swift steps across the road to the mesquite on the other side, just before a bright star crested the horizon, growing brighter and louder and more fearsome as it approached where the fox had been until it coalesced into the shape of a semi.

Now, at the end of another night, another pair of headlights blazed through the desert alone, attached to a grey 1999 Chevy Silverado. A black trash bag, less wet than it had been some time ago, still heavy and in danger of rupturing, shuddered in the bed. A woman, young but feeling much older, her neat bob sweat-stuck to the nape of her neck, sat in the driver’s seat. Her clammy fingers tapped the steering wheel off-beat to the song on the radio.

“When I met you in the summer,” she muttered, somewhat surprised she could remember the lyrics. “Summah!”

She caught her obsidian eyes in the rearview mirror, admiring them despite her predicament, and unclenched. The road behind her was dark but for the dim red glow of the taillights. She squinted. One of the taillights was out.

Flora had been half asleep, mostly drunk, moaning incoherently from the roiling hurt in her stomach when she slipped in the bathroom. She had been stumbling, of course, one eyelid fluttering uselessly, her spine a curtain rod jammed straight up, and she had been trying to get up off the toilet when her foot hydroplaned in a mysterious puddle. Her head hit the towel rack hard and she puked.

For a while she couldn’t move, just swayed, suspended, held up by her pounding forehead against the wall, legs quivering. A little pee crept down her thigh. She registered almost nothing until a knock at the door jolted her upright, drool flung from her lips.

“Hurry up, I need to get ready.” Roz’s voice.

She’s pissed, Flora thought, stumbling again towards the sink, her heart clenched tight, too afraid to beat. Her underwear sank to her feet, getting wetter and wetter from whatever was all over the floor. She’s pissed I fucked up this is the worst. It’s over.

“Flora,” she said. Knock knock knock. “I’m gonna be late.”

Where the fuck do you have to be, not like you have a job, I’m the one who has to be up early, she raged to herself. She took a deep breath in, held it through three more knocks, and exhaled.

“I’m sorry,” she whined. “Five more minutes, please? And then I’m out, I promise. I’m so sorry.”

Just silence. Flora held her breath. The door was a half step away, past the sink. She could reach the lock before he opened the door, maybe, if she started right now.

Roz grumbled something on the other side and walked away, her socks swishing on the fake wood floor of the hallway.

Flora sank to the floor and splashed in something. She couldn’t stop shaking. Searing, blinding light was peeling itself out of her head and making an awful ringing while it was at it. She wheezed out a laugh.

Why was the floor so wet?

Water covered the floor. It was seeping out into the hallway.

The shower curtain was drawn. Flora got to her hands and knees and, carefully avoiding her own vomit, crawled over to the tub. It was wet all down the side. It didn’t matter who had done it, she was going to take the heat for it. Hopefully there wasn’t a leak downstairs. She pulled the curtain back.

It was covered in dark fur, about the size and shape of a child, and immediately Flora knew it was dead. Its head was a balloon, bigger than a watermelon. One of its huge, elliptical, jet black eyes had collapsed in on itself, gray sludge trickling down out from the inner corner. A frog tongue peaked shyly from its toothless mouth. One thin purple arm was draped over the side of the tub, its limp hand ending in four amphibian fingers. She glanced down at its crotch before she knew what she was doing. She tore her eyes away back to its dead face; but it was dead, so it didn’t matter, so she looked again, and there was nothing but fur. A thin brown leather belt, waterlogged, was cinched tight around its throat.

“Ohhhhh,” she groaned. “Ohhhhhh.”

That’s not real, she thought, over and over. She tried to stand and slipped again, half in water and half in puke, and her hand caught the arm, which tensed and snapped under her weight. Its skin felt like her skin.

Roz pushed through the door. Flora stood, spun, wobbling, trying to protest, and puked again, sticky through her speech. Roz cursed and slammed the door shut. Flora waited until the swearing stopped, which was when the front door swung open and closed, to finally collapse. The stink of bile hung heavy in the bathroom, and the dead alien was still reclined in the tub when she turned back around.

She passed out leaning against the toilet. When she woke up her hair was soaked and reeking. Her headache had split her skull open at some point and her mouth and throat were cracked and dry. At the very least her stomach felt better, if still empty. The alien stared at the ceiling, seeing nothing.

Get it together, girl. You need to get it together right now. Get it together.

Flora pulled herself off the floor and out of the toilet. She could stand. Her head was off its axis somewhat but her eyes were open and the ringing in her ears was mostly gone.

Roz was gone, apparently given up on brushing her teeth before she went to do whatever it was she had going on. The apartment was empty. Vomit floated lazily across the flooded bathroom. The hallway was only a little wet, a littoral against the tides of a bad night and a worse day.

Her phone was in the sink. Six missed calls from her boss, a couple dozen texts from Roz, an overdraft notice from her credit union. She was three hours late to work.

A wave overtook her, a small wave but an action of nature’s indomitable power nonetheless, and as it swept by she found her footing. She still didn’t know what to do, only that something needed doing.

After pocketing her phone she rinsed her hair out as best she could in the sink, brushed her teeth, and left the bathroom to get dressed. She returned with a dirty bath towel and began soaking up as much water as she could. She triple checked the apartment to make sure Roz wasn’t just hiding somewhere waiting to catch her off guard, which she had done a few times before, and deadbolted the door.

The alien hadn’t moved or changed. It was really dead. Flora strapped on the long vinyl gloves she had to use whenever the toilet was clogged and unplugged the tub drain. Soon a wet dead alien lay beached and damp in her bathroom.

There was no memory of the night before, no clues in her head nor anywhere around. If the memory existed it was wafting somewhere outside in the sunlight. She remembered planning to go out with her friends but that had been at work. She had met everyone at Lala’s on 8th Street. Samantha had been there, and Josie, and Josie’s idiot boyfriend, all drinking, and then at some point Roz had shown up. She couldn’t remember anything else.

Not like it mattered now. She had Roz’s keys and her truck and the corpse in the back and the last remnants of the night above and around her. The unfailing eye of the sun would be held at bay for just a few fleeting minutes longer. Already, to her left, a distant fire had erupted across the horizon, so far in the future and across the world as to warrant only a meager ribbon afraid to take to the air.

Another light broke heavily across her vision and panic clenched around her spine. It grew brighter and passed. It was driving towards town, where Flora had come, or maybe one of the gas stations that trailed off away from civilization. Not my problem, she thought, sweating, trembling.

The truck hit a bump going 70 and the dead alien flopped and thudded back down hard in the bed.

She had dropped the alien plenty already: three times hauling it out of the tub, slippery and unhelpful, its head smacking sickly against the porcelain; one minor fall when the first trash bag ripped and spilled all over the living room carpet; one really awful terrible fall down the stairs leading down to the first floor, the corpse saved by its arm twisting under the gap between the stained steps, the popping wrenching sound pulling one last thread of puke from Flora.

The idea to leave with the alien came unbidden but it rang like bells in the back of her mind. Its soggy corpse was piloting her. She didn’t have to ask Roz’s permission to leave, didn’t have to dart her eyes to find an exit, couldn’t wait for the perfect opportunity or the right friend to offer up a couch for her to crash on. The dead alien had to leave, and so Flora had to leave. So Flora left.

Stop signs and red lights blew by unheeded. Most everyone got out of the way of a truck going that fast. They all became blurs. The tan stone strip malls with their black windows and shimmering parking lots melted into the mountains of the desert while the road, hot and furious, stretched forever and ever, the alien drying then cooking in the trash bag in the back.

In a span of time Flora could not recognize or distinguish she had put the city behind her. All around was dirt, saguaro, horseflies, waves and waves of heat, an ocean of it, piled atop her and all the little cages she had lived in all her life.

Around noon or one she pulled into a rest stop shaking from hunger. Once she had been on IV drip and she felt her stomach icily clench as she refueled without eating. The needle in her was different now.

Glancing around, seeing no one, she clambered weakly into the bed and undid the trashbag drawstrings. That was how Roz liked her own shorts undone, not too fast, so they could both savor the delicate movements of Flora’s fingers, nails unpainted for years, skin around the cuticles red and raw.

Plastic stink wafted from the bag but the alien didn’t smell at all. Flora leaned over and found herself in its glassy eye. In the sunlight its fur shimmered like an oil spill, sparkling from its armpits and neck where the last remnants of old bathwater clung.

There she was, upside down in the reflection, Flora and a corpse, one seeing, the other blind, three eyes open, still cooking in the bed of the truck in the desert. The flies kept their distance. Her secret was too putrid even for them.

This was her secret, not Roz’s, not something they shared, not anything that connected them or chained them, hardly real, just barely beyond imagining. Flora knew if she touched the corpse she would feel it. She had already likely lost her job, and whenever Roz got back she would probably report her truck stolen, and then she would find her, somehow, because she never failed to reel her back in. Flora couldn’t help it; when she thought about being caught she smiled. It brought tears to her eyes and bile into her mouth.

Flora unfastened the belt from around the alien’s neck, bought a bag of Bugles and a Gatorade from the vending machine, and sped off south. The black road yawned on and on and it didn’t matter how fast she went now, only that she went, further and further through time until night.

Her phone buzzed now, bright in the cab even as sunrise threatened. Roz again. She thumbed through her notifications. The truck swerved slightly as she read down the list, Mom, Roz, Roz, Roz, Mom, Samantha, down and down, Get 10% off when you Buy Three!

Keep it together.

County Road 16 materialized on her right like a bonfire, ablaze. She barely made the turnoff in time. Rocks screeched against the underside of the truck. Something clunked unseen.

The threat of the sun was pursuing her. Flora had to keep her eyes away from the mirrors. The fading shadows of the night preceded her, waiting for her, urging her on, a few miles more, just a little farther.

She ran out of gas along a stretch of road undriven for three weeks. The sun was rising. It was cascading into the sky, into reality, out of myth. In the dawn the threshold of possibility was thrown open, widened. In the desert, in the open, the sun did not solve mysteries but dredged them up and laid them out wriggling, pathetic, dying on the surface. Everything it touched became real.

Flora had not thought to bring a shovel. The trash bag finally ripped as she hauled it over the rocks. Her alien was splayed dead and dry behind her.

Tires grunted over rocks and gravel. A smaller car appeared out of the sun. The roar of its heat was deafening and Flora sat in the road, not bothering to look. Even when the car stopped and Roz climbed out and walked with all the time in the world Flora still kept her eyes on the alien. Its mouth was still open. It had died trying to say something. It had been speaking since Flora found it.

“This is stupid,” said Roz. “All this for what? Look at it. I mean, really look at it.”

Flora nodded.

They left together. At great expense the truck was towed away. Days and nights passed while the alien lay dead on the road. It did not decay. Animals left it alone. The desert closed around it.

One night, weeks later, implausibly, a semi began to rumble over County Road 16, unseen in the clear wild gloom but for its headlights, which shone on the dead alien, twisted, still, and silent where it had last spilled out of the trash bag.