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April 12, 2021
Flash Dancers: Ekphrastic Singles - "Wicked, Twisted Road" by Epiphany Ferrell
The Flash Dancers: Ekphrastic Singles series is curated by Meg Pokrass. Authors share an original work of flash fiction inspired by a song.
"Wicked, Twisted Road" by Epiphany Ferrell
Inspired by “Wicked, Twisted Road” by Reckless Kelly"
My first love was a wicked, twisted road. I know what you’re thinking. All us low-rent, low-class, dive-bar troubadours love the road. No. I mean, yes, but no. You’ve never seen a road like this. Slender and yet curvy, with humor sly as a hidden rock. I never knew what was coming next with that girl. She liked it that way. I was seventeen. She was a million years old, I guess. Rue was her name. Rue, French for street. Rue, English for bitter regret.
“Why don’t you find a girl who’s going somewhere?” my father asked me. “Look at your mother, for instance. You might think she’s always been this broad street, but even when she was an alley she had connections. Even if she did have a graffiti mouth.”
My mother pays my father no mind. He works for the Department of Transportation. He’s not home much and when he is his clothes smell of boulevards and frontage roads.
“Don’t you bring any traffic-light activity in this house,” my mother tells him, drawing a line and she means it, too. He wouldn’t dare.
Me, though. And my little country road. Barefoot, with glittery-asphalt toenail polish. She wouldn’t know what to do without a ditch running along beside her.
I take her with me to the city, show her the turn-lanes and the roundabouts.
Turns out, she knows all about four-way stops. It’s my first time.
Afterward, as we lie together under the overpass, listening to the fearless thunder of the big dogs, the semis with their oversize loads, I start talking to her about driveways and sidewalks. She sits up on one elbow, looks at me with her reflector eyes.
“I was just fine until you came along,” she says. “Your mama don’t like my ditch.”
I protest. She’s right, but my mother doesn’t like anything I do with any road or street or highway if it goes out of town. And for me, they all do. Of course they all do.
“Anyway, now I’ve seen the city, now I want curbs and gutters.”
“I’ve give you a shoulder,” I tell her. “A bike route.”
I want it so bad, I can see it. A sloping driveway, and I’ll get an edger to keep the grass clear. We’ll have a little sidewalk, a meandering little, mischievous sidewalk.
“This is a dead end, Lane,” Rue says. “This is your off-ramp. But first, we have time for a detour.” And what a detour. Bumper to bumper all night long.
My first love was a wicked, twisted road.
Epiphany Ferrell lives perilously close to the Shawnee Hills Wine Trail in Southern Illinois. Her stories appear in Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021, New Flash Fiction Review, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and other places. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and blogs for Ghost Parachute.
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