Our SG Fiction newsletter features an original short story from a different author around the world. It’s part of our set of expanded offerings. At least once a month, you’ll receive an original short story from a different part of the world, today’s selection is by Kimberly King Parsons from our Texas guide.
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Baby Teeth
By Kimberly King Parsons
You can fly into Amarillo or Lubbock—it doesn’t make much difference. Either way, you’ll still have to drive for more than an hour on the hottest, flattest road in the world to get to my mom’s house. Desert is too pretty a word for the landscape you have to claw through—it’s endless sand, no night blooms, no exotic animals to trigger with a revving engine. You see everything there is to see full form, from miles away—farmhouses, Jesus billboards, the occasional clump of cows, all of it—tiny at first, getting bigger as you make your way. My mom lives in a place called Earth, which is a funny name until you have to listen to people make the same jokes about it all your life. I used to live there too, but I left.
In between the little speed trap towns, you can go as fast as you want, and I do. The windows are up, AC vents pointed right at my face, but there’s still sweat on my thighs, grit in the air. It’s a brutal backdrop, impossible to keep out. I really open up on 84, not because I’m trying to make good time—I can’t say I’m ever in a hurry to get back home—but because there are no other cars on the road, and the little blue rental is so light and low to the ground, it’s like a toy I’m supposed to try and flip. It’s risky, this invincible feeling—people get killed on this stretch all the time. A lot of them are drunks, but drivers also die from boredom, literally, because the road bewitches them and they fall asleep, launch themselves into dusty nothing. Once when I was a teenager, my mom and I came across flashing lights and paramedics, two bleeding people on stretchers, a small mound on the shoulder, covered by a sheet.
