Road Trip

✿ This article was featured in Issue #5 of the Atlantic Bulletin

They showed up at the autopool, and someone had just returned a brand new AAAC Voya Voya — incredible. It was like Christ himself had blessed them. It only (barely) seat five, and there were six of them, but it wasn’t a problem. Moise would drive, Tzipora bunked with Cobian in the passenger seat and Alise, Zo and Jerome could cram into the back. It was a squeeze but with the top down and on the coastal highway it couldn’t have mattered less. It was the car of late summer.

Zo had just married Jerome, and they had recently moved in with each other at age 17. Tzipora had no metrics to figure out if that was too young, but Zo was her friend and young newlyweds were lonely people. She was all too ready to volunteer her labour (and that of Cobian and Moise) to drive them down to Koisniya and pick them up a coffee machine she’d ordered six months prior. Tohs S.p.A. was a good company but Tohs himself was a disorganised bastard and he’d rung up to a few times to tell her the order had been delayed. Then she called him back a month later and he said he’d never received the order. So it was that they were on their way now, well after Zo and Jerome had married, to pick up the wedding gift. That was just how things worked in Vekllei.

Zo’s friend Alise sat the coffee machine in her lap on the way back, and as the coastal highway reached Vik it skirted an incredible series of cliffs that they stopped to look at. The wind was out and the Atlantic churned beneath. The sun was hot on their skin. The coffee machine was left on the tiny back seat as they got out to have a look and take a picture.