Some Girl Lit from me again. An excerpt from my ms Flesh of the Peach, which I completed just over a month ago. It’s a novel of flight, guilt, love and lovelessness. Sarah Brown is an older girl – late twenties, just at the border of accepted girlness. She qualifies, I feel. A girl holding mourning at arms length, with a tired soul and old violence swarming inside, but hopeful of reinvention. Here she’s on the run, travelling by Greyhound from New York City to the Southern Rockies of New Mexico, hovering liminal somewhere in nighttime Oklahoma.

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Goose

The moon, shaped like a silver hook, had disappeared many hours before. Leaving in the Western sky grades of velvet blue, slowly. The bus lights were off but for here and there the screen of a phone, an overhead glow. A dull rumble from the engine that swamped her.

The air was clammy, cold, smelling of old food and all those crowded bodies, but mostly of the over-used toilet in the back. Sarah cupped her hand to her nose. Wished for a peppermint oil-laced handkerchief. An orange to peel. Inhaling a salty breeze from the sea. There was nothing to do but to breathe through her mouth until the next town.

Outside the flat empty earth of Oklahoma, pocked by islands of light – floating farmhouses and spindly, tower-like structures she presumed were for oil. If Oklahoma rested over a slick black sea. Sarah tapped her fingers on the glass. Beyond, it was empty, it was unhooked. If she held her breath from this town to the next, would she pass out?

An image of the bus seats imprinted on the blackening landscape,
Another farmhouse. A home glimpsed through the windows, lit up and gone.
An explosion of bright black spots from the dazzling break between the hills.

*

She opened her eyes when the bus made a swing across the black plain towards a sudden city of lights, which drew nearer and more terrible. The bus pulled into a vast empty lot. Elk City. There was no centre here, no city nor any people. An intersection of strip mall and highway, and the night past the reaches of the streetlamps looking like nights would be in dead cities engulfed in sudden ashfall. The coach steps led off onto the concrete that swayed because she did, ever so slightly. Catkin girl. Paper doll woman.

Four hours into the third day. The petrol station shop was blinding and smelt of doughnuts and bleach. Sarah walked the aisles, looking at every sandwich, every can of energy drink. Finally choosing a thin stick of jerky meat plus cheese flavouring, a juice that was too expensive and that was green for health. At the till the change rolled out automatically into a special dish for her collection; a marvel. No hands touched.

Sentimental moments always claw their way in. You need no smell to bring them close, perhaps just a shadow, or nothing; your brain dredges in the mud and there it is:
No hands touched.

Maud had died at eventide. Cousin Lucy had told her, when Sarah had called. The sounds of geese going by. Wrong time of year, but there you are. The hands on the counterpane so delicate and veined, and with nothing to hold. These sorts of harmful detail. Why didn’t Cousin Lucy hold the hand? Or Aunt Selene?

Sarah’s father, Ethan Hamasaki, great love of her mother’s life, had not been present. Ethan Hamasaki had had to maintain a pre-measured distance, set times for his appearances. The act of his mistress, the mother of his child, finally actually dying was not something he felt the need to see. Maud would have wanted him there. The tips of their fingers curving as he put her hand into his. That white spurt of a scar caressed with a thumb. Even the migrant geese knew that. Maud would have wanted him.

Sarah went outside and watched a large man in a tartan shirt carrying a handful of mustarded hotdogs and a folded but obvious porn magazine, up to his eighteen-wheeler.

Sarah lent against the wall. It was warm. The ground and air were sweetly blurred. Smell of fertile earth, drifting from a distant field, invisible somewhere over the great concrete sea. She was trying to think of a poem her mother liked and would recite.

The moon was a ghostly galleon

The moon was a ribbon. The road a ribbon? Of moonlight.

Moorland, blue or black. Purple. The highwayman came riding, riding –

The trucker had got up the steps and now sat behind the wheel, and set the engine idling. He took off his cap. He must have placed the items somewhere because his freed hands were at his eyes. Pressed hard in the sockets. Elbows jabbed out. It took her a little while to realise he was sobbing. The man began hitting at the wheel and the top of the dashboard with fat, mustardy palms.
Perhaps something on the radio.

Perhaps the hotdogs were too bland. Or the porno.

Keep it light.

Sarah walked back from the convenience mart to the bus, stopping to watch a stray dog pitter across the forecourt, then to hand feed it a piece of the cheez jerky. Its snapping chew, dumb, unwavering stare.

On the bus she sat back in her seat, tightened her blanket. The driver had turned the air conditioning up to full blast. She thought of the bus like a Titanic, sailing towards a cold and glinting disaster. The moon is a ghostly galleon, there is no moon in the sky, the new moon is a sunken ship. Her fingers under the blanket gripped her tucked up legs for the little bit of warmth. She stared at her reflection, and dimly beyond it, a giant, dog-eyed country.