By Leah Mueller
My owner decided to take me for a long spin down Route 66 a month and a half after her husband died from cancer. She’d crouched at the poor guy’s bedside for days, playing John Prine and Alice Coltrane tunes while mopping his forehead. He lay unresponsive, wasting away into the rollaway hospital bed.
Personally, I thought it was too soon for her to embark on such an ambitious adventure. She has always been impulsive, launching herself forward when she should be taking time to pause and reflect. Or grieve, for Chrissakes. Since I’m a Camry, I never complain. A turn of the key and I roar to life, every goddamn time. It’s my job to do as I am told.
Of course, she had to do the trip backwards. LA to Chicago instead of the other way around. Part of it was because she lives in Arizona. She wanted to get started immediately. Also, as a lifelong contrarian, she liked to do the opposite of what she was told.
I was afraid she’d get lost. Signage on 66 sucks. The road winds like spaghetti. I watched without comment as she labored up a mountain towards Oatman, Arizona. Lots of folks skip that part of the route. It’s treacherous as hell, with blind curves and steep drops that would terrify an Indy 500 driver.
She gripped my steering wheel and stared straight ahead without blinking. Obviously, it wasn’t time for me to protest. Non-cooperation on my part would lead to her demise. A pair of close-together deaths would just be too tragic. The time to kick up a fuss would’ve been at home, in the driveway. Too late now.
Two hours later, she reached the summit. Oatman was deserted, as it always was after 2 p.m. The only store had shuttered for the day. A cluster of wild donkeys stood in the gutter, braying. Every sidewalk was littered with crumpled piles of donkey feces. The shit looked like it had been there a long time and would remain for quite a while longer.
Not a person in sight. A sudden wind gust rustled through the dry sagebrush, making a high-pitched, whistling sound. Then the street became eerily quiet, like an empty stage waiting for the curtain to go up.
My owner cut the engine so she could examine the scene more closely. She wandered across the street and peered into one of the shop windows. This gave me a bit of time to allow my engine to cool down. I felt glad for the rest. In a few minutes, we would need to get moving again.
My owner squinted at the sky. Her face wore its usual stoic expression; eyes shrouded behind her sunglasses. She was a tough one, for sure. We were two of a kind.
It was all an act, performed for nobody’s benefit. In an hour, I would shepherd her to a cheap motel. I’d rest in the parking lot while she lay alone on a hard mattress, staring at the wall. There, in the darkness, she’d let the tears come at last.
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Leah Mueller’s work is published or forthcoming in Rattle, Writers Resist, Beach Chair Press, NonBinary Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, New Flash Fiction Review, Does It Have Pockets, Outlook Springs, Your Impossible Voice, etc. She has received several nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. One of her short stories appears in the 2022 edition of Best Small Fictions. Her fourteenth book, “A Pretty Good Disaster” was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2025.