Eyes black like moons, he drops two dollars thirteen cents into my hand\u2014the exact change for the gallon of Milo\u2019s, the twist-top bottle of blue gatorade, the family size Uncle Ray\u2019s sweet heat barbecue chips in the plastic sack hanging off the hook of his long rough fingers. Money can buy happiness, he says. The fluorescents shimmer above him and the dusty gas pumps and the truck that smells like old truck and the lake. Don\u2019t let anyone tell you otherwise. Let\u2019s go. We drink the tea right out the jug as we rumble down 11W. The windows down.<\/p>\n
Every time we go down this road I think about that story, about the couple who flew through the windshield one night. When they found her, he was still in her mouth; when they hit the tree, she bit down around him until her teeth clacked. Dead as anything, as mud. When he first told me that story, he asked if I\u2019d die like that, if it would be worth it, and I said something like Depends on how good her head was, but I was thinking about the woman, about her mother finding her like that, or anyone finding her like that, mouthful-dead. There exists a kind of love that\u2019s worth that. A fistful of coins rattles in my shirt pocket. I hold the mouth of the jug to my mouth and in the driver\u2019s seat he\u2019s got an arm hanging out the window, he\u2019s got his sunglasses on though the sun\u2019s down red, he\u2019s grinning at something I said or something he said or thought. I pass him the jug and he drinks where I drank.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Money can buy happiness, he says. The fluorescents shimmer above him and the dusty gas pumps and the truck that smells like old truck and the lake. Don\u2019t let anyone tell you otherwise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":21767,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","writer-dakota-edwin-collins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21260"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21768,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21260\/revisions\/21768"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}