BY A. K. COTHAM
Copyright is held by the author.
YOU PULL the skin off the cooked rotisserie chicken from the grocery bag in your back seat, because that’s closest and grossest. (The dog doesn’t need it anyway. He’s already shaped like a burrito.)
It’s easy to ignore how it feels in your hands once the joy of rubbing chicken fat across an Acura’s windshield overrides the terror of getting caught. You get into the groove of it. Like conducting a symphony. No — like Daniel learning with Mr. Miyagi — and you whisper wax on, wax off, motherfucker as every inch of the windshield gets smeared. The Acura is parked mostly in shade, just hidden enough from whomever might walk over, like its owner, the asshole who cut you off and stole this parking spot when you had your goddamn blinker on.
Smear on, smear off.
You should finish the job, flee the scene before you lose track of time. Which can happen when you start humming to yourself (like you’re doing now), in the same way that soothes you while getting stuck with needles, like the one you just got so the dermatologist could remove a heart-shaped patch of your own scaly skin for a biopsy. Humming with your heart pulsing hard, no doubt because you are vandalizing a vehicle in the parking lot of a hardware store but also because your heart hasn’t stopped over-pulsing since you sat down in that office a couple hours ago, because it’s that time again to check things out but this time they might have seen something new and this time they think it might look like, it could be andyou have to hum back hard against this time, is it this time, could it, might it, is it —
A car door slams nearby. You freeze. Stop humming. Take stock of your surroundings, distantly passing voices, the passing time. This limp chicken skin in your hand, it’s like it never belonged to a living animal in the first place.
You stuff the skin back into the packaging and consider your artwork. Sunlight and shadow through the overhead branches contour the streaks in a viscous, Starry Night-esque swirl. It’s good and greasy. But is it swirly and greasy enough?
Here’s the thing: if you get caught, it may as well be for a job well done.
No sign of the owner yet. So, maybe you have more time. Show that smirking owner what it means to mess with a day like yours. Somehow, show every smirking owner, each owner of something from somewhere past that you had to let go, what it means. You peek into your purse. What else do you have?
Lipstick. You’ve got cheap drug store lipstick, an OK colour called Ruby Rummy Rose, one that you suspect makes you look older in real life than you think you look in the mirror — but, in the shape of a heart and arrow that fills the driver’s side window, looks absofuckinlutely great.
***
A. K. Cotham lives in Northern California. Her fiction has appeared in places such as MicroLit Almanac, 50-Word Stories, Microfiction Mondays, Every Day Fiction, and CommuterLit. Two short stories have been performed by Sacramento Stories on Stage, and a piece won third place in, and earned a Pushcart Prize nomination for, Brilliant Flash Fiction’s 2022 writing contest. Her work is at akcotham.wordpress.com/.