written by Emily Zasada | illustrated and art directed by Plum

It was mid-December and the dealership was shimmering both outside and in when Jimmy brought them to me late in the day. Handed me their folder and shot me that look he always does, the one that means Please. He’s as dumb as a lug wrench and believes he can squeeze a deal out of a rock. Which, as a matter of fact, he has done — a number of times — but only with my help.

I flashed him my usual grin — I’ve got this, Jimmy. But it wasn’t until he’d left and I pointed them to their chairs, and I saw the curve of her stomach as she turned to sit that I understood what I was dealing with.

Just for a moment, I hesitated. Outside my locked glass door, I could see them still swirling around, the dreamers and the idiots. Money trembles at the top of their bank accounts like beer foam, just waiting to spill out. You can see it, how the wanting sweeps through them like a fever. You can see it in their eyes.

It was in their eyes, too. The eyes of the couple on the other side of my desk.

“We want a low payment,” the man said. He sounded rough, like he’d been chewing on shot glasses.

As soon as she thought I wasn’t looking, his wife shot him a look. Ah, so: she’s the smarter one, I thought. Always good to identify that one up front, from my perspective. But still: from the model of the car that Jimmy had written on their folder, neither one of them was very smart. Their credit was up on the screen in front of me, and it told a story of impulse and greed. One or both of them needed comfort, often and desperately, and they liked it delivered in the form of things they could attach their fevered desires to, and climb in.

The wife moved forward in her chair. “Do you know — ” she began to ask. Then she lifted up a hand. A small wedding ring glittered in the light. I don’t know why but I quickly covered up my own with my other hand, like I was ashamed of it or something. Everyone is a different person in a different situation, I guess, and in that room I wanted to show her that I was what a strong independent woman could be. That it was still time for her to get out and make her own choices, even with that little bump under that thin blue top she was wearing. Still, I don’t know why I would care. It’s my choice to wear it to the dealership every day, even though I’ve been going home alone to a little apartment for years where my only company is my cats. It’s my lie to tell.

“Oh — ” The hand fell back down. “Never mind. I guess you’re not the person to ask.”

“What?” The husband shifted in his chair. It was obvious: he’d never worked at a desk and probably never would. He hated being there, but it was a sacrifice he’d chosen to make to whatever gods he believed would move into his body when he took hold of the car keys and make him one of them. “You aren’t going on and on about that safety report you read again, are you? Listen, Lils, we’re getting that car. Look where we are. It’s almost done.”

I was desperate to move the conversation along to finance rates. Because no one knew better than me that no car was truly safe. People want to believe that they can make themselves safe, but they can’t. We’re all made out of the flimsiest materials. Little packages of blood and bone that can be pierced at any moment.

I asked them if they were interested in leasing or financing, and how long they were planning on keeping the car. In their eyes you could see the future spinning out in a way that was new for them. She was thinking five years down the line, I guessed, trying to picture this baby who was still a stranger drinking juice in the back seat. Watching her with eyes that reminded her of herself, or him, or both. And he was wondering if he would still even be with her. If she would even matter anymore.

I could tell: They didn’t know what they wanted. They had no idea.

“You don’t know what you want, Tessa,” was one of the final things he said to me. We were in that sad kitchen in our old apartment. Sticky stains on the cabinets that wouldn’t come off, and the counter littered with empty beer cans and wine bottles for recycling. The thing about it is that he was right. I had no idea what I’d wanted. After what happened, I’d tried religion for a while before I’d turned to drinking, but neither did much of anything. And the affair, too, with the Indian car salesman who wore that beautiful steel bracelet, like cold clouds on a windy day. That didn’t work either. Not that he ever knew about that.

It was maybe two weeks before the papers were signed and he was gone for good. Ben had been dead for two years.

“Just see what you can do with the payment,” the man said again. He twisted his body away from the woman’s, as if he were sending her a message, or himself. “I’m not committing until I have a number.”

They were young, but old enough to have made mistakes. Most of the numbers I could give them were swollen from their past choices.

All except for the balloon loan.

The final payment would hit them when love staggered away under the weight of the bills and the arguments and the stress. When their child was no longer a wee bean that gurgled at the world with wonder, and was instead a real, tiny person who could say I want. When they passed one another in their hallway at night and averted their eyes to avoid seeing one another’s ordinariness.

That was when the final payment would hit. That was when the bill would be due.

Outside the glass pane of the door, Jimmy paused, waiting to catch my eye. His face shining with hope. Past him the windows glittered with the reflections of everyone hunting down the last deals of the day.

Here, all of them believed in me. Here, I was a god in a tiny world.

I thought again of what he said to me, my ex. How I didn’t know what I wanted.

Oh, I do know what I want, you bastard, I thought as I printed out their paperwork for the balloon loan. The empty dreams in the dealership surged around me like a song. Nothing here matters, but all of it is as real as anything else. Florescent lights beamed down on my kingdom as I pulled the papers off the printer. It’s this, I thought, as I placed the papers in front of them to sign. I want this.

About the artists:

Emily Zasada has had a story previously published in Flock (formerly Fiction Fix). She’s a fan of jazz, seventies music, and the color orange. Originally from Maryland, she now lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, son, and two highly opinionated beagle mixes.

Plum is an illustration collective based in Brooklyn, NY.

The Free Clinic

It was getting dark. The millennium was about to turn over and under the shadow of the second Bush administration the clinic would be shut down. We sat, waited for her name to be called, for her to be taken into the back to sit on that crinkly paper, scratching at her thighs.

Borderland

I was walking yesterday evening down a dirt road winding along Maine’s infinite shore. I was looking west, toward the setting sun, and didn’t notice the doe on the east side of the road until I was right next to her, practically close enough to touch. Deer do this sometimes, allow you to get surprisingly close even as they remain piqued, ready to run.

Dear Nnamdi

I shouldn’t show up today, but I’m coming to your wedding. The American wedding. I will stand when the minister asks if anyone objects because I do, and I’ve always wanted to attend a wedding where that happens. I’m a law student, I know how to object. I’ve got evidence to sustain. Your poems. Dick-pics. Clothes in my dresser. Toothbrush in my bathroom.

Café

The cappuccino machine whirrs, clicks and sings. It sends out a deep hiss, a musky sound, as resonant as something from the throat of a big cat. The air is sugar-scented, the trays are loaded with bite-size confections, aspic red jellies on circlets of biscotti, dabs of meringue, blobs and swirls of chocolate.

Sex with Indians

The Institute was where I’d been working since age twenty-one, an Institute “devoted to ending violence against women and girls.” In reality, it looked nothing like an Institute. It was a former bookie’s office set above a fancy San Francisco Chinese restaurant.

Chrysalis

At one end was the Interaction Section — bubble machines, drones to fly, crafts and building activities. The busiest was the Technology Zone — banks of screens where small fingers swiped and tapped, the odd shriek as a wailing victim was dragged off to be fed.

body memory

the hum and purr in my elbow when my phone’s on the desk at work and a text comes through. the thrill in my veins when i see your name on the screen. every time. my thumbs tapping letters, punctuation marks, spelling out our own version of shorthand, scrolling for bitmojis, and gifs, racing with yours

The King of the Jungle

It’s about emotional engagement, he reminds himself as he puts on the kettle, not exposure. Their customers will love that they’re giving back. Even if they don’t tell their friends about it, they’ll become more loyal to the brand. He stares at the sea for a while. It’s the same dark grey as the granite countertops, as the sky.

When the Rains Come

There are the war machines rolling down the street in all their military glory, wreathed in jasmine and marigold garlands. They are affectionately known as war elephants, because underneath all the glamour the bulky tanks are gunmetal grey. They belch out plumes of black smoke into the already polluted air. Despite their decorations, they are colossal beasts made of pistons and steel, lumbering about the narrow streets, and yet there are still vendors who walk fearlessly beside them, calling out their wares.

Queen of Wings

He got that way from eating pieces of string like they was noodles with sauce on top and everything, and string beans, and nothing else. But out in the woods the girl and him didn’t have much of anything to eat. He was too proud to farm in the dirt and he was a lousy hunter. They would have starved except the wolves took pity on him and left out a few scraps of rotten meat.

The Balloon Loan

Between the Wish and the Thing

Out in public, you tell your colleagues that the two of you have become “close friends.” That you are strictly platonic confidantes. That your connection is akin to a brother/sister bond. That your conversations are equal parts vapid college anecdotes, light-hearted work gossip, and generic commiseration. That even if there was more there, you don’t even find each other attractive.

Music Our Mothers Made

Our mothers were wolves. They roamed the great, cold northern night in a pack, electric purple van screaming down county roads from party to party, where they caught boys named Jesse and Jason and James with their abundant thighs and sharp eyes and clever tongues.

Mike Doesn't Seem to Want to Join the Other Dogs

She looks ordinary, though she has terrific posture because she’s a dancer. She has wavy brown hair and thin lips and isn’t afraid to lock eyes with me; then she begins to look better and better, telling me all about her meditation, that she meditates every morning, though she’s never had any instruction. When I ask her how she knows she’s meditating, she says she just knows.

Succulents

I was laying on the grass by the bubble stream listening to Tribe play out of the speaker cone of my rock. Watching the bubble bubbling. Pink nettle cactus and tall frond trees all around. Not much else.

April, Quakes in Kathmandu

You announced you were coming with the roar of a supersonic motorbike revving. You had us at your first knock. The billows of dust clung to the windows, which had unlocked themselves. Still, the curtains danced, and the glass cracked. I remembered what I held. We were arrested without the cuffs. You clanked the plates together; we tumbled.

Stones

Lonely tantrums. Eyelids. Adhesive bandages. Mother says that you have taken a course. Mother says that you can intubate a man and shake his stomach back into its sac. You sent her a copy of your stamped certificate.

Bedlam

The bed we bought from Sears, a sale, a snip, and it became to us the all but boundless sea, an ocean even, on which our bodies, those separate ships that did not pass in the night, but met, came alongside one with the other, grappled together, rocked together, joined, conjoined, a nautical act of union upon the white-sheeted waves our urgent

A Rare Spark

The accumulated weight of days. That’s what I told her. When she asked why I was still in bed. What the fuck does that mean. What it means. She said she was done. Well, so am I. Like a steak at Denny’s: barely edible and covered with sadness and salt.

Sophie

Sophie dropped the sentence into the room like flour. It formed a thick, white cloud that, once spoken, she could not wipe from the table. There was an empty chair where Robbie should have sat. While the ice machine crunched in the corner, Sophie’s hands grew into the table. People getting their morning coffee didn’t notice her.

Ting's Tale

I hate cats. At least I thought I did. I was in the midst of a whirlwind a couple of years ago, writing a book about Emily Dickinson, who also hated cats. Seems her kid sister, Lavinia, had a whole kingdom of cats, and the poet found Lavinia and her cats as vindictive as King Saul. I had other reasons to look at cats a little aslant.

An Accounting of Small and Large Catastrophes

Then I gave what was left of my heart to a losing battle, knowing the end of the story before it began. Terminal: years or months or weeks. My parents worried that it was too much for me, all those hours of driving and the hours spent sitting by her bed. I took the heart from my chest when it became too heavy to carry, and kept going.

Birds Want to Kill You

It’s best to wear a hardhat when feeding barred owls. There is always one asshole among them who will dive bomb your head. Maybe it is the same one each time and that fucker just has an attitude problem, or maybe they take turns. It’s hard to tell.

Preschool Remembered in Hashtags

Adults spoke through hissed genealogies, the early tantra of tongues disguised by complicated trigonometries settling in the corners made by angled remarks rather than traveling the vistas of straight lines. Realizing perhaps to be considered smart like my brother Jonah involved mastering pointed comments, the art of pricking people with words.

Better

The only thing he laughed at was a plastic fan we bought from Ace Hardware on clearance because that summer was blistering. We moved the fan into his bedroom where it ran all day and all night. The fan made him flap his arms as if he believed he were a bird.

Hypothetical

Wouldn’t you have to choose someone dead,” I say, “because I mean come on wouldn’t that be amazing to bring someone back from the dead wouldn’t that be wicked but wait though would they still be dead but dug up and woken up like would they be all gross and worm-eaten and rotting or would they be at like the prime of their life and healthy ’cause that makes a difference or wait what if you choose someone dead but you didn’t realize you have to die to have lunch with them and then it’s too late to change your mind because you already made your choice

Breaking the Hand That Feeds You

Some suggested voice-to-text software. “I don’t write that way,” I explained. They shrugged their shoulders as if it were an excuse. Words come out of my fingers differently than my throat. Sentences surprise me. Ideas are more organized. Words flow instead of spilling over each other.

He Named Himself

Lyrebird, rumpled Australian ground fowl. He sings the song of a gas-powered chainsaw. He hears it every time a pink-cheeked forester cuts a flank of the landscape, then mimics the brattle until it synchs. Lyrebird named himself as a way to lie, maybe, delights to clack and tick like the strappy gear of a bird-watching troupe.

In Lost Time

The first thing you hear your father do after your mother leaves is laugh so uncontrollably it hurts your insides. He’s a large, large man, and you think of all his blood hitting fast food joints on its way through the capillaries.

The Margin of Error

She counted the number of words in each love letter, the duration of every phone call and every kiss, counted each petal on each flower in each bouquet. She quantified the warmth of his hand on hers with an infrared thermometer. She tallied the expense of his gifts, accounted for every drink, every meal. She timed his eye contact.