Short story published in Drunk Monkeys Magazine, Oct 2020.

Wish I were there with you.

Anyway I’m gone as much as you are.

The words were scribbled on a receipt which faded on the dashboard, once-black ink steadily baking brown.

Sunlight poured in, casting specks from dead bugs plastered to the windshield across the brown face of a thickset girl. She hunched over a textbook propped upon the gearshift, filling the back of an envelope with tiny square writing.

I wonder if you’d like it here.

No ‘Dear,’ as if the recipient’s name were too precious to be casually read, or — as no one Farah knew had any chance of doing that — as if she wouldn’t admit to writing the sequel of that first love letter, weathered on the dashboard over so many miles, through messes she’d mostly cleaned up, and more than one storm.

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