Free The Mother Road by Meghan Quinn

four hour jaunt across Arizona, but no one even dared to ask Marley to pay her “mooning” dues. Instead, the men huddled close together, keeping our distance from Marley, who couldn’t seem to stop grinding her teeth. She sat in the back of the RV on her dad’s bed and typed on her computer.
    Bernie whispered that we were in red dot special mode right now, and were to stay far away from Marley and on guard. Growing up with the McManns, I knew exactly what red dot special mode was. It meant don’t talk to the beast and protect your junk. You were to blame if you got knocked in the nuts.
    This morning, I was trying to get the toilet job done before Marley even woke up, but the pump was so damn loud, I was surprised she didn’t wake up earlier. The minute I saw her, I tried for a joke, bringing up one of our favorite Christmas movies we used to watch, Christmas Vacation. It didn’t quite have the effect I was hoping for. Quite the opposite, actually. Pretty sure she hates me even more.
    “Fifty thousand years ago, the meteor struck earth at twenty-six thousand miles per hour. It made a divot of two point four miles in circumference and five hundred and fifty feet deep. It’s one of the oldest preserved craters to date.”
    Classic Paul and his encyclopedia barf.
    “Could you imagine being alive when there was a meteor coming straight at you? Do you think you would be one of those people in the movies who just stares at it, or do you think you would run?” Paul asks.
    “Run. What kind of idiot would stare at it?”
    “Paul would,” Marley says from behind us.
    In synchronization, the men scrunch their shoulders from her voice. They’re still waiting to see what happens next. She walks up to the cab area, a water bottle in her hand and a carrot hanging out of her mouth like cigar. This morning, Paul and Bernie made sure to grab healthy options from a grocery store the local owner of the KOA drove them to. Marley was a healthy eater and they wanted to make sure, after last night, to accommodate her. That didn’t mean they still didn’t get their all-time favorite snack: Funyuns. They were always on the list; it was a McMann tradition.
    This morning, when she was wrapped in her blanket, I would have loved to get lost in her warm, fresh-out-of-bed body. Her eyes were still sleepy, her brown hair was falling out of her loose braids, and her heart-shaped lips were plump and ready to be kissed. She was too fucking tempting.
    After she got ready for the day, she painted her face, put some product in her hair, and dressed in a pair of skin tight jeans and a hot pink T-shirt. She was gorgeous, but she wasn’t the girl I grew up with either. The girl I knew wasn’t into wearing makeup; she wasn’t much into looking at herself in the mirror either, but this older Marley was different. Made me wonder how much of the girl I grew up with still existed.
    Cautiously, Paul defends himself. “I wouldn’t stand there and watch. I would run like Porter.”
    Marley snorts and sits on the back of the dining table bench. “Paul, who are you kidding? If you saw a meteor coming toward earth, you would drop trou and jack off.” Marley pretends to jerk off a fake penis and says in a deep male voice, “Oh, yeah, a meteor, a gift from the unknown.” She scrunches her nose and then sprays her hand at Paul, fake orgasming his face and says, “Meteors!”
    “That would be dad you’re talking about,” Paul scoffs, wiping away the fake jiz from his face.
    “Watch it,” Bernie warns, clearly not liking his kids talking about him whacking it off to space items.
    Paul folds his arms over his chest. “I don’t get off from space.”
    “Paul, you used to speak Klingon to me. Pretty sure you would beat your meat to a meteor. You practically pissed yourself that one time we watched a meteor shower. Remember, out on the trampoline?”
    I chuckle to myself as I remember that night. Paul and Marley had a trampoline on their farm, the kind