Caitlin Morris
When she realized she’d forgotten the peaches, she was idling at the four-way stop a block away from home, and the peaches were still on the side of a country road forty-five minutes outside the city. She closed her hands tighter over the steering wheel, envisioning the abandoned cardboard boxes. Inside them, the sweet peaches, pock-marked by sparrows, wriggling with ants.
When the day began, she’d imagined it unfolding like something out of a glossy food magazine’s summer spread: grilled peaches, balsamic vinegar, basil leaves, and juicy mozzarella slices—all under the gold sheen of late August. But the forest fires had turned the sky an unreal beige, and the sun glowed a grapefruit red. And now, she was almost home with nothing except a new layer of ash settling on her car and a deluge of text notifications. Her guests were on their way.
A car had tailgated the whole way home. As soon as she noticed the dusty red coupe six inches from her rear bumper, she signaled and maneuvered to the farthest right lane. The car followed, remaining close. She promised herself that she’d keep a reasonable pace; she was practiced at deflecting nuisances. She narrowed her focus to the grill that needed lighting, appetizer plates and cocktail napkins to arrange, bottles of Viognier and Chenin Blanc to chill. In the rearview mirror, a cloudy ash-laden windshield obscured the face and form of the person tailing her, silhouetted by the red sky.
The car behind her honked. She didn’t accelerate or let her foot off the pedal. Instead, she let the car follow her, ignoring the intermittent honks.
“They’re trying to get a rise out of you,” her mother often used to say. She said it when the neighborhood kids smeared dirt onto her new bike, packed its wicker basket with sod, and ripped rainbow handlebar streamers. And yet again, when the same kids scratched on her bedroom window nightly for weeks, terrifying her into hysterics.
“Don’t let them get a rise out of you,” her mother had cooed, brushing the tears away gently with her fingertips.
The highway curved past her old elementary school, and for a second, the familiar cafeteria smell of butter, bleach, and body odor penetrated the car’s sealed doors and windows. The sticky scent mixed with the sporadic honking briefly overwhelmed her. She could hardly see through the smoke blanketing the road. Somehow the noise, too, obscured her vision.
She considered pulling over, but the hundreds of hours of Dateline she watched on Friday nights discouraged her. So instead, she thought of home, the hum of the HEPA air filter, the chime of the stemless glassware positioned in rows, the doorbell, the burst of voices. Don’t let them get a rise out of you.
The lines of evergreen trees faded into rows of townhouses, and she exited at the familiar offramp, almost laughing at how she pulled the other car with her, as though it had become her shadow.
At the four-way stop, a block away from home, she realized that she’d forgotten the peaches. But then the red car’s engine revved, and the sweet fruit rotting in the summer heat didn’t matter. She needed to decide what to do.
As she thought, memories arose unloosed by the glimpses of her elementary school flickering between the trees. Instead of making a plan, she recalled the industrial-sized cans of peaches served in the cafeteria. She remembered slicing the rim of the 106-oz can and peeling off the lid with her thumbnail. She almost felt her hands submerged in the orange syrup, squeezing, the fruit resisting and giving way. She couldn’t even hear the honking. Instead, she tasted the aluminum-tinged sweetness.
Pulling over, she turned off the car’s engine and looked in the rearview mirror one last time. Catching sight of her reflection, something formidable and charged returned her glance.
She unlocked her car door and stepped onto the street, readying herself to meet whatever it was that followed her home.
CAITLIN MORRIS teaches writing and literature at Bellevue College. While earning her MFA in creative writing from Western Washington University, she served as a fiction editor for The Bellingham Review and later for Belletrist Magazine. Recently, her work has appeared in Ghost Parachute. In addition, she co-hosts Special Lady Day—a podcast about rad women in history—with the poet Jessica Lohafer. You can find her at @ccmorrisohmy.