#letterinside

I think I’m in love with Judith. We picked her up somewhere west of the Appalachians, at a rest stop with a Styrofoam cup of coffee and an easy grin. She wears thin summer dresses like crumpled sheets of tissue paper that get all twisted up into straps and stick to her shoulders like embroidery, without purpose and direction in the backseat of the car.  She is all thigh and sprawl and big and sometimes we see her nipples spill out, none of us want to say anything and she always shifts back anyways right before, and it feels like some part of her personality is small and brown and only ever accidentally visible, accidentally vulnerable. I didn’t even know you could pick up hitchhikers now. I didn’t know anyone still moved around the country with nothing better to do. It felt like transit beforehand, Just Isaac and Frankie and I swaying in a train-compartment of a car moving from one side of the continent to another. Suddenly it was a trip. Suddenly I wasn’t sure that there was really an end to the trip, if we were really going to visit our estranged father, if that ranch house from the Facebook photos really existed.

You know every time you tag yourself in a photo, you’re just making the government’s facial recognition system more powerful?” She hates photographs, and complains loudly whenever Isaac pulls out his phone to take a panorama of some soybean field at sunset. Other than that she doesn’t really talk much. She’ll sing along with me whenever Frankie plays the guitar though. We’d have a proper band or something if it didn’t sound so intimate. Frank starts playing something fast and light, and Judith and I start out high over Isaac’s low humming, she a little quieter and warblier than me, but the guitar is too alive sounding. The whole car just echoes with the movement of his fingers and the squeak of metal, like we’re in the texture of his fingerprints. And he plays for her voice, not mine. I guess we’re all a bit in love with her.  

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