You’re across the bar jingling quarters in your cupped palm, blue-faced from the light of the jukebox, looking for songs that aren’t there when a woman wearing a purple tutu on her head says she’ll read my palm for a shot and a beer.

Songs you sang to the baby while you rocked around the living room in the evening. Twilight Dance Party, you called it, even in the summer when the sun was still high.

Water hands, says Tutu Lady. Long palms and fingers, see that? Soft to the touch. Damp, too, though it’s chilly in here, sealed away from the sun’s punishment. We’re somewhere in Arizona, one hundred ten today, enough to dizzy up the blood.

In the desert, water is a mirage. You drive and drive toward a lake that evaporates.

But water is water, real or imagined, and hot is hot, dry or not.

Start me up, Mick sings. Never stop. A song you’d never sing to a baby.

Tutu Lady says I’m lucky, my lifeline’s strong and long the way her mother’s was. Cancer ate her up from the inside out, but okay, her mother was ninety and tired, ready to move onto the next thing.

On the road, the only rules are no rules: No four-lane highways, no fast food joints, no campgrounds with RV hookups and game rooms. What we save on lodging and showers, we blow on drinks in shitty bars, the shittier the better. Windows curtained in dusty neon, a couple of smokers huddled around the front door, names with a certain seediness: Joe’s Down Low, Frank’s Dive, Thelma’s Cellar. When people ask where we’re headed, we say Nowhere.

Sounds like you’re running from something, said the man at the bar in New Mexico. Not to.

There’s a mark on my heart line, a little red square below the finger where I used to wear my wedding ring before I lost it swimming laps. I lied and said it was stolen, promised I’d fill out the insurance forms.

I never did. I swam more laps. Oh, the water.

We used to wait until 5 o’clock, but lately we’re barely past lunch when we start to drink. In the car, our silences are full of sharp things we aim at the raw spots.

Booze is balm for the scraped parts.

Something happened, says Tutu Lady tracing the square with her fingernail. Something hurts.

Who’s a good boy, you used to say. Like he was a pet, the same silly voice you used for the cat. Me! he’d squeal. Who’s a burrito? you’d say, try to wrap him in a towel to rub him dry. But he’d run around wet, slippery as a bar of soap and just as hard to grab, daring you to chase him. The fun you had while I was stuck scrubbing out the tub, swabbing the floor where the water had puddled.

The one time I didn’t.

At some point you’ll side your last quarter in the jukebox and come back to me. We’ll drink each other close, kiss or hold hands, remember what it was like to like each other before we forget again.

If I’m a wave, your silence is the rock I break against.

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis; A Brief Natural History of an American Girl (Accents Publishing, 2012), Sort of Gone (Turning Point Books, 2008) and We, forthcoming from Harbor Editions in 2021. Recent work has been featured on Writer’s Almanac, appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018) and Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020. Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006.