Free Backseat Saints by Joshilyn Jackson

asked Saint Roch. He only shrugged. It was Rose Mae who knew the answer.
You’re in shock, you moron. Eat some sugar.
    I popped the cap off the Coke with the opener on my key chain and drank half of it off. I usually carried a granola bar, but
     I’d left my purse at home. It hadn’t seemed right to bring my driver’s license and a lip gloss along to shoot my husband.
     All I had was Pawpy’s gun, both pieces stuffed back inside the Target bag, and the gypsy’s Stephen King book, sitting on the
     passenger seat.
    Then I thought to look in Mrs. Fancy’s glove box. She had three snack-size boxes of Sun-Maid raisins tucked away in there.
     I dumped one box out in my hand and started eating them, picking them up one by one with unsteady, pinching fingers, like
     a toddler. They had no taste, but I swallowed them dutifully, taking them like pills. When they were all gone, I got out of
     the car. The windgrabbed at me, stronger than it sounded from inside. There was nothing in these flat fields to slow it.
    I pulled down the brim of my cap so the wind couldn’t take it. I walked across the field, my saints trailing behind me in
     a line. The only footfalls I heard were mine, but the heavy wind was saint’s breath on my neck, strong enough to move ships,
     yet sweet like a cow’s, warm and grassy.
    There were no tourists, no one at all around right now. Just me and the cars. I stepped in between two of them to get out
     of the wind. The closest car looked ready to crumple in on itself. The looping net of spray-painted words over words over
     words might have been the only thing holding the back doors on. The graffiti overlapped, letters and pictures and colors canceling
     each other out, layered a hundred deep. I found I still had the Coke in my hand, and I finished it off, staring at the closest
     car over the tilted bottle.
    The gypsy had told me to come here. She’d been insistent. She hadn’t wanted me to wait even an hour, and now I understood
     why she’d been so demanding. I knew what I would see. Somewhere on these cars, she’d left a message for me. Maybe she wasn’t
     sure if she even wanted me to see it, so she had hinted it was here and then left it up to fate. She’d seemed like she was
     big on leaving things to fate.
    I could imagine her with a spray can, the wind in the wheat field blowing her scarves and layered skirts around as she covered
     over older words with silver, the paint staining her finger, making one car’s side into a blank, clear page so she could write
     to me. It was the safest way to tell me how to find her.
    You are welcome,
she had said, right at the end. Not like I had thanked her, which I most certainly had not. She’d said it like an invitation,
     but an empty one, to nowhere in particular. I’d been focused on stealing her book, looking for the information she’d already
     left here for me. It seemed so obvious now, and now was when I most needed it.
    Thom was out there, so angry that he had swollen up to be miles wide, filling up all the space between me and home. The sunwas rising up and making full, bright morning, and every minute that passed made it more likely he would catch me out.
    I wasn’t sure exactly what-all she would have written. An apology? She owed me a thousand of those. I wanted her note to say
     that I was a red hole dug out of the guts of her, a seeping wound that hadn’t healed a lick in the twenty-odd years since
     she had left me. More likely it would be more crystal-fueled dumb-assery, telling me which stars were sorry. She’d left a
     map or an address, that I was sure of.
You are welcome
, she’d said. It was an offer. There would be a place for me to come, to hide, if I failed and had to cut and run the same
     way she had done.
    If I was like her.
    I went to the end of the row and began searching the cars, working my way down, looking only for newer messages that had silver
     in them. I found quite a few on the first car.
Neal + Wanda =