with your honey and try to be good or Santa won’t come. But, hey, if you gotta be bad, might as well be reeeal bad!” And then the soothing white noise. She shuts off the engine and gets out into the whipping air. It’s below freezing and she’s wearing only a light coat, a cotton house dress, her cheap ruby slippers, and hole-ridden gloves. She stays close to the car to block the wind and makes her way to the trunk. She opens it and stares down into its contents, begins to say a prayer over them—her rapist uncle, complicit aunt, bastard cousin—a strange orgy of dismembered limbs and torsos and heads. She bites down on the prayer and swallows it back. She gathers enough saliva and then spits. She slams the trunk, puts in the key and, with strength and ease that surprise her, snaps the key off in the lock. The wind escorts her into the bus terminal. She doesn’t look back at the car. She goes inside to a ticket window and, with a wad of crumpled bills—each pinched, saved, stolen, or sacrificed and stored in a floorboard beneath her bed for months—buys a ticket for the first bus to the West Coast.
7