On the hood of an Impala,
behind the laundromat

Short Fiction | Rick Hollon

cw: alcohol, smoking

My mom caught stars in a bottle when I was little, and we would watch them burn down drop by drop between the cool gums of my fingers, their cyclone planets chilled beneath the glass.

My world smelled of laundromat exhalations and mom’s breath of booze. Would such chemical combinations spark life in those captured seas, those bottled primordial ponds? I worried the fumes would catch a light from a wayward sun, a sharp gasp of heat, a dandelion bloom of nova that would outline us there on the hood of her Impala and leave only our shadows in its ash. How fast is a lifetime, if it lights up only for a moment inside a bottle? How long is a world?

The smell of cheap whiskey meant mother. The smell of combusting helium meant beryllium, oxygen, carbon, a child’s ladder of elements. You only need to climb two steps, then four.

A pair of carbons, a handful of hydrogen, a cueball of oxygen.

Mom breathed it out, primordial vapor, lit a cigarette, and left the bottle in my hands. She went back to work inside the laundromat. I shook a galaxy to watch it spin beneath the glass.