Tina

Tina sucked long, light cigarettes in the claustrophobic cabin of her metallic blue, mid eighties Chevy with the heat on no matter what season it was. The upholstery was powder blue fabric, cheap and tinseled with clear plastic filaments like industrial high traffic carpet, and burned through in craters rimmed with melted crusty edges by her careless cherry, showing yellowing foam underneath like a unblinking, jaundiced eye. The car interior seethed nicotine flavor with tinges of exhaust from the climate control and decaying polymer.

Tina was always on the lookout for bumper stickers. If she saw one she liked she would try and find it for her own car, or at the very least repost it on facebook, offering it up as a mantra, wisdom on loan. She wasn’t interested in espousing religion or politics which she felt insisted themselves to any sane person, she chose stickers that made a more social criticism of the idiots in the world around her, or a general gripe. “Shut up, I have Kids.” “Learn to Drive or Get Out of the Way.” “Get Off My Ass.” And “You Should Be Ashamed.” The bumper sticker was a great way to express herself, Tina thought. It was a wonderful packet, vaguely hard to challenge and nebulously meaningful. Tina wasn’t comfortable with specifics or allowances. The bumper sticker left no room for the snakes to wriggle out from under the thumb of judgment, with their confusing rationalizations. You could hardly tell what was real and what was a lie, all the more reason for Tina to cut their fancy talking off at the knees.

Teenage celebrities were on drugs and having psychotic breakdowns, and Tina related how she and her cousins were also out of control on drugs when they were teenagers, but they could never afford enough drugs to cause a psychotic breakdown, therefore they were better. She said “The weather better not be so crumby next weekend, or at least gas prices better come down,” as if the two were related. The smell of cigarettes clung to her breath, her clothes, her bottle blond hair like the memory of a suffocatingly hot blanket. She updated her facebook status to “Its better to wear a jacket than carry it,” and went about her day.