A STORY by P.V. VAMSIDHAR
Dido
My dead girlfriend shuffles alongside our car in the Taco Bell drive-thru, her hands in her pockets. She doesn’t look at me, gazing steadily ahead at the empty parking lot. A smack of dried blood stains her t-shirt. The wind grasps at her hair, and the moonlight passes through her, pooling on the ground. I try not to stare, my leg jogging in the passenger seat. Finance chatter crackles low from the radio.
Dad inches the car forward, studying the menu board. His eye is pink-red where I punched him. My knuckles still ache. There’s this queasy, twisting knot in my stomach. My dead girlfriend sways on her feet through my window, and I want to roll it down and reach out and try to touch her, but my dad is in the car, and he’s already dealing with the fucking shiner I gave him, so I settle for leaning my head against the glass.
“Faith.” It’s the first thing my dad has said to me since we got in the car. “What do you want, bud?”
I lick my lips. “Soft taco?”
“Sure.”
He pokes at the order button. His fingers tremble a little. Go figure. Now both of us are scared shitless.
I didn’t mean to punch him. I don’t even remember doing it; I woke him up with one of my bloody murder screams, my bedsheets twisted around my ankles like a twine of rope. It was dark and I was crying and he was trying to give me a hug I think, but I couldn’t see his face and he was a man looming over me, and I couldn’t breathe, I was tied down, and there was a knife in my girlfriend’s neck, and my girlfriend was—
We’d looked at each other. It hurt to inhale. Taco Bell is the only place by our house still open at two in the morning. Dad, gently, asked if I was hungry. And we tugged on our shoes.
The bag the guy at the window hands my dad is warm, spotty with grease. Dad parks in the empty lot and motions for me to sit with him on the hood of the car, paper crinkling as he unwraps his burrito. My dead girlfriend lingers in the grass next to us. The blood on her shirt is spreading slowly, reddening the white like that one experiment I did in science class as a kid with flowers in colored water. The soft taco might as well be cardboard.
I almost say sorry. The words stick in my throat. Dad takes my wrapper when I’m done eating, careful not to touch me.
My dead girlfriend gave me her favorite necklace at one point. I forgot when. It’s cheap, shoplifted from a Claire’s when she was sixteen. The clasp is tarnished the color of pennies. Her throat is too bare without it. I twist the pendant between my fingers and watch her as she begins to walk away from us, drifting towards the road.
P.V. Vamsidhar (any pronouns) is an Indian-American writer who enjoys fiction that bites (literally). Their work has previously been featured by West Trade Review, Broken Antler Magazine, and others. When not creating he enjoys reading, or wandering lonely streets around the Dallas area. Visit her at pvvamsidhar.com, Bluesky, or Instagram.