Published by Indiana Review
Evening came. There were more people around her car now, some of them with badges and uniforms. What in the world, Aiko thought. Had she been asleep? She reached her hand behind her head to check her wound and realized that her shoulder moved in its socket without pain or impingement. She didn’t feel anything at her nape. No blood, no scar. Aiko felt that she would never be thirsty again. That she would never be hungry. That she would never want anything ever again. She felt as though she had walked through a portal. That she was complete. She was out of chips. What a shame.
The people were rapping at her window, calling her “ma’am,” asking her to take off her sunglasses, demanding to know the date, the president, if there was anyone they could call. Aiko had experienced huge feelings in her life: the frantic rush of first love, the suffering and lifelong outrage of rape, the lacerating joy at the births of her children, the overpowering fury when she found out about her husband’s affair, the bleak salt flats of grief that she walked for what seemed like forever after the death of each of her parents. But nothing could match, not remotely, the boredom she felt at the actions of the people who surrounded her car. It was as if she had cleanly uncoupled from the life she’d lived, as if that life—the life with love and joy and terror and rage and grief—had been lived by some other kind of creature, the kind of creature who would bang on the window of a car and make ridiculous demands of a woman who was quietly minding her own business as she had done, Aiko thought, from the moment she was born.
Night fell. Someone, a fireman, had arrived with a tool. They were going to cut her out, apparently. Like a sardine. Or break her out. Like an emergency hatchet. As though she weren’t in possession of herself. As though she weren’t simply making a rational choice to ignore them. The boredom was so heavy, so thick, it was like a mudslide engulfing her from her head to her toes, its weight increasing with each second. And yet she felt great—humming with strength and energy. Honestly, Aiko thought, I could murder each of these people in a jiffy: boom, boom, boom. She pulled her compact out of her purse and, though it was dark in her car, saw in its mirror that she was who she had always been: pure white hair in a sensible if unkempt bob, multitudinous laugh lines, naturally red lips, high cheekbones, a small, well-shaped nose she’d been proud of because her mother had admired it so thoroughly. Behind her shades, Aiko could sense her eyes glinting brightly, watchfully. She heard a sharp, metallic thunk on the glass of the passenger-side window. The last wisp of patience left her. She closed her compact with a click and dropped it into her purse, then placed her purse with a loud rustle atop the empty bags of chips.