Katey Lehman Creative Writing Award (Fiction)
The Most Real Thing
by Samantha Mitchell
Sylvie looked like a girl who loved horses. Long brown hair in a
single braid down her back, wide-tackle shoulders, faded denim overalls.
She scrubbed the blood off her hands in the cracked sink of the unisex
bathroom. The warm water burned.
Outside, the tractor-trailer waited under bright fluorescent lights
that buzzed like drones. She ripped the last paper towel from the dangling
dispenser and caught her ring finger against its jagged edge.
There was a lot of blood.
If Daryl and Ben could see her now, they wouldn’t speak. She
avoided the mirror because she didn’t want to see what she already
knew—her face sagging, eyes defined by sharp shadows; her skin pallid as
sun-bleached hay. The thought chilled her to the bone, like dipping into
Brown’s Pond at midnight, the cold water inching slowly up. There was
nothing so unforgivable as the light in a truck stop’s bathroom, nothing
so unnerving as catching your own eye in its splotched mirror, gaunt and
sad and flecked with something else’s blood.
Huge semis rumbled to stops near the gas pumps. Doors slammed
shut as drivers clambered down, stretching their legs in the perpetual
dance of the long-road trucker. She ran her tongue between the gap in
her front teeth as someone jiggled the bathroom’s handle, rapped sharply,
and backed off.
She scrubbed harder, squeezing her eyes shut. Tiny worms of
nervousness wriggled in her belly. She clicked off the light and stood there
in the settling gloom, listening to the toilet tank gurgle, breathing deep
the cloistered smell of urine and Dial soap, feeling her heart chirrup like a
caught moth against the walls of her chest.
Brown’s Pond loomed dark and dull in her mind’s eye and she
wondered what she’d do even as, deep in her gut, she knew.
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