What first made her run is long forgot, but run she did. Giving careful head in the backseat of limousines was only the beginning. She dreamed of the stars, of stardom and of actual stars, of an impossible silver life onscreen and off—red carpets, green rooms, the blue flashing lights of overdose—and when the cracks begin to show and you run out of inner space there's always the oblivion of actual space.
Yet first she ran. Or drove. Or was driven. Endless bloodred nights, long midwestern trains keeping pace alongside her constant flight. Hitchhiking, joyriding, from turning low-track tricks to hunkering down in hayricks.
Sometimes an easy charm, apposite words, and timely fingers down the throat won't save you. In the end, the teeming randomness of the world swoops in, all smirks and honed surfaces, and snatches you up.
You wanted outer space? Here's space. The shattered windshield glass sprayed like the Milky Way over dark asphalt, each tiny star part of something vast, lovely, and immutably unhinged. Howling through the night, blunt force impact, then the pure silence, the longest gap between breaths, after the broken parts settle and before the dawn cleanup arrives, when even the dry wingsongs of cicadas cease.
Her eyes. Always so pretty. Seeing pretty things. Each piece of glass a makeshift jewel, a life inchoate, hanging amid the vast black fugue of eternal night. Watching them all swirl like bitter snowflakes and cruelty and, one by one, dissolve into nothing: hay bales, pocketbooks, purloined kisses, shining things.