OLYMPIA by Anne Savage

CW: sexual content and harassment

You look out the window and say, “It’s going to be bad, isn’t it?” But we don’t know yet just how bad it’s going to be . The snow started three hours ago . Someone had punched the sky in the nose and now it has two black eyes . In the dark glass of the pharmacy automatic sliding door, we can see our pale, timid faces reflected. As you and I deliberate, we stand just far enough away from the door’s sensor so that it won’t discern our presence . It was foolish of you to venture out here in the first place, but you had to go to the pharmacy because you had to buy cranberry juice . You had to buy cranberry juice because you have a UTI . You’ve been pissing every hour . It feels like magma and is the color of Coca Cola . As you walked from our house to the pharmacy, you ignored the twinges . Meanwhile, the snow accumulated on your eyelashes and melted down your cheeks . Between your numb top lip and your nostrils was pure snot slick . After you arrived at the pharmacy, purchased the cranberry juice, crumpled the receipt in the pocket of your thrifted coat with the seventies faux fox fur lining, you called me . My tips were dismal tonight . Do you know how truly desperate a person has to be to sing karaoke at ten o’clock on a Thursday night during a blizzard? I stashed the bills in my push-up bra (the one with a strap held in place with a safety pin), then I scraped an inch of stubborn ice off my car’s windshield with a debit card attached to an account with a balance of negative twenty eight dollars . I drove to you . You say, “It’s just going to get worse . ” We decide to run for it . Then we are in the car, snowmelt running in rivulets down the cracked leather seats . I left the engine running . The movement from the windshield wipers is frantic but the rhythm of the sound comforts me . The dust from the blasting heater smells nostalgic . I leave the pharmacy parking lot with my left hand lolling on the lower half of the wheel . You hold my right hand, rubbing warmth and circulation back into the chapped pink skin (I want to be too devilmay-care to wear gloves) .

Under normal circumstances, it’s a seven minute drive from our house to the center of town, less if you run the stoplight . But these circumstances are abnormal . Nobody’s bothered to clear the roads . The men who drive the county plow trucks must love their warm beds and lovers too much . The snow covers everything . I can’t tell where the road ends and the countryside begins; you can’t either. No one’s come here before us and there’s no predestined tracks to follow or to blame if we crash . With both hands now, I clutch the wheel . “Tell me a story,” I say . I can’t see the look on your face because I won’t look away from the road and the snow scintillating in my headlights. I’m driving fifteen miles per hour. I hear you swallow down some cranberry juice before you reply, “What kind of story?” “I don’t know . Any kind . ” You hesitate . Then: “All right . I have one . Not about me . About Johnny . ” Johnny is your ex-boyfriend. The first time you went out with him, the two of you smoked weed in his car in the unpaved parking lot of a national park nearby . The secluded lot was full of birdsong . Impulsively, you decided to hold his hand and crack his knuckles for him . It was only your four month anniversary that he eventually confessed to you that on that first date, the weed made him paranoid and when you touched him he wholeheartedly believed that you had lured him out there to kill him . You broke up with Johnny two weeks before the UTI . You begin, “Last I heard from Johnny, he just joined a finance club.” “What the hell is that?” “They sit and talk about stocks . It’s all old men . He also joined Alcoholics Anonymous so now instead of drinking whiskey at parties, he mixes a bottle of cough syrup into a liter of orange juice and he drinks that instead . ” “Orange juice with pulp or without?” “Without . ” “Why are you even talking to him, if you’re broken up?” “He needs my help . ” “What are you supposed to be, Jesus?” “He needs advice . Genuinely . That’s all . ” “What kind of advice?” “After we broke up, he started going on these… anonymous video chat websites. To meet strangers . You know . ”