Gabriella Pitts
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The Devil Drives a Cadillac
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 It was his eyes I noticed first.
            Twin chips of ice, ringed red and watering while he adjusted his grip on the trigger. I’d seen him skulking about inside the gas station, turning idle circles by the soda machine. In the marrow of my spine I could feel it— I felt it as I walked in with my daddy, the bell tinkling a friendly tune behind us. His difference. From us, from the other customers. The woman smoking behind the cigarette counter, the teenage boys clutching plastic-wrapped hot dogs and sweating cans of beer. His eyes burned a hole in the back of my head, so pale and evil. Inviting.
            It didn’t seem too dangerous to steal a glance at him while my daddy paid for his cigarettes. I dug my teeth into my bottom lip, pulling and chewing the strips of dead skin. I was at the stage in my life where every look was a kind of challenge. One of my own endurance, one of male intention. It was a dare, a thrill and a terror. Come closer, please stay away. And there he was, leaning into the side of the soda machine, staring right back. Hair frizzy and pulled into a sloppy ponytail, the blue convenience store light draining all color from his face. Making him look sort of oily and vampiric. I reached for my daddy’s hand, suddenly feeling unwell.
            We didn’t live too far from the store, just a ten minute walk past fenced-off cornfields and a half-abandoned cattle farm. I was thirteen then, long-haired and often barefoot. A blossoming narcissist, staring with dismay into every shiny car window we walked by. I studied my hair in the distorted reflection of the cash register, trying to fix it with quick, desperate fingers. Only making it worse. Pausing in front of the shop window one more time and then there he was, eyes and all, hand reaching into his pocket and slowing time down into fragments.
            Spittle clung to his lips as he ordered us into the trunk of his car. He grabbed at my wrists and shoved me into my daddy, who’d begun to cry, his pack of cigarettes unopened and abandoned on the concrete. There were only four dollars in his wallet, which our now-kidnapper had gripped in his filthy hands, and a school photo of me from the year before. Genteel smile, a peter pan collar peeking from the bottom. Sexless and freckled, tender. I hated that photo, turned it over on the fridge, magnet on the watermarked back. Ashamed at how very childish I looked, how obvious it was that my mother had brushed my hair.
            He stuffed the dollar bills down his pants, not removing his eyes from where we cowered in the trunk. I hoped one of the people I’d seen inside the gas station would walk out. I wondered why they didn’t. When the man found the photograph, his gaze finally lowered, if only for a moment. When it flicked back up, his lips curled into a disgruntled sort of grimace. The sun was high overhead, flattening purplish shadows against his face and making him appear more gaunt, two dimensional. He tossed the photo to the floor, ground it down with his heel. He kept the gun drawn as he slammed the trunk closed.
            The trunk smelled like piss. Pitch black save for a strip of light that lit up the tears on my daddy’s face. I wanted to look away but my head was crooked between my knees and I was forced to watch him peel away into a sniveling old fool. I tried not to listen to his whispered prayers, muffled slightly and dripping with death-bed confession. To my grandmother, to God, to me. I ran my fingers up along my arms, felt the razor-burn and the scar from a biking accident last September. I smelt like coconut oil, I tried to breathe it in. Tried to block out the stagnance of the car. The misery of it all.
            I don’t know how much time passed but by the time the man opened the trunk the sun was low in the sky. He had his arm braced like he thought we might’ve been preparing an attack. No such luck. We were both silent, except for the wheezing of my daddy’s breathing. He was too incoherent to even beg for his life. The man grabbed him by his shoulder and poured him onto the ground, where he lay without protest. It was difficult, embarrassing even, to watch him lack the mental power to even grovel. The man rolled him over with his boot and stared him down with a bemused expression. Then he knelt down beside my daddy’s head, held the silver chamber against his temple, and whispered something I didn’t catch. My daddy let out a thin groan and pulled himself upwards. His face was slick with tears and dirt. The man shot him just as his eyes reached mine.
            I was familiar with this new wave of fear, in the way all girls are. I’d read the newspapers, seen the milk cartons and posters hung behind the cigarette counter. Little girls gone missing, never to be seen again. Or seen, bloodied and soul-tied to wicked old men. My mother sitting on the edge of my kitten-print bedspread, hands knotted in her lap. Trying to explain, never finding the words. But I was well acquainted already. Knew it from that deep, primal fear in my gut when I had to walk by the high school boys in the parking lot. Leaning, leering, casual and wolfish. I’d known. I’d known.
            When the trunk next opened it was dark. He stood there, gun perpetually in his left hand, the other hanging limp by his side. The whites of his eyes stood out against the night. We were at a motel, the vacancy sign blinking red, bathing him in an ominous ruby light.
            “Get out,” he demanded, jerking the gun angrily.
            Sitting back there for so long had made my limbs fold horribly, and he kept the barrel level to my head as I unwound myself. There were flecks of blood all along my arms and shirt. Probably my face too, but I had no way of knowing.
            We stayed in the motel that night. He covered the window with a towel and ran me a bath like I was a baby. He hovered in the doorway of the bathroom as I washed what was left of my daddy down the drain. Pink rivulets of fatherhood around my ankles. In my mind I looked at him in his shifty blue eyes and demanded to know if he was going to hurt me. In my mind he said no. And he said it so tenderly and full of concern it was almost beautiful.
            I did meet his eye, though. In the bathroom mirror, I stared. Frantic and impossibly blue. Uncomfortable. Different.

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Gabriella Pitts is a seventeen year old girl from Arizona who now resides in Paris. She is fascinated by surrealism and the grittiness of the everyday, hoping to marry the two within her work. She has been previously published in the Petrichor Gazette and the Antler Velvet Arts Magazine.