12

There was no air.
There was a lot of heat, but no ventilation.
The atmosphere in the car stiffened around her and stagnated into an unbreathable soup. She gulped against the empty, hoping to choke down a breath, but her lungs remained paralyzed and unfilled.
Panic set in and she started to flail her arms in a last ditch effort to open up her airway.
She couldn’t find any air and she tried to open the passenger window.
There was no button to make the window go down. There was just some handle that she cranked in a circle, but the window still didn’t go down.
It was so hot.
Five hairs seemed to pick up on her panic and rolled his window down. A rush of highway air swirled around the cabin and released her.
The bare skin spreading out under her skirt, from her thong across her thighs and down to her ankles, started to burn painfully and she regretted the skirt she was wearing. The cootchie cutting hem line got her the lift, but a ride might not be worth all the skin.
There she was.
The dichotomy tickled her ears slightly as it breezed by her, and she wondered if her face was shiny and flipped down the visor so she could use the little mirror.
The ride may be going in the wrong direction, but at least she was moving.
Sapphire flipped down the visor and studied the rectangular reflection tossed back at her from the tiny mirror. She hated her high forehead. It reminded her of her dad. Not that she could remember him or even pull out an old photograph to cuss at. It just wasn’t her mom’s forehead and it was the one thing she could definitely blame on him.
Her mom gave up the sad tale one day over some toasted Leggo’s and told Sapphire the story between syrupy bites and vodka sips. Sapphire got the gist of it, but the ending was a bit slurred and somewhat vague.
But it went something like this;
her dad had worked the midget wrestling circuit because he could never catch a break in Hollywood. He was too tall, according to all the casting agents, to play the traditional little people roles. But at four foot six, he couldn’t land any other part. He starved on The Strip for a bit then hooked up with this cat name Big Al.
Big Al bought him some drinks one night and told him he could make a fortune wrestling. He would be the biggest little guy East, West and North of the Pecos (He couldn’t guarantee South, because that was out of his licensed area).
Sapphire’s dad jumped at the chance and signed his name to a contract written on a cocktail napkin. He squirmed into some spandex, donned a cape and called himself The Jumbo Shrimp. A legend was born.
Not quite.
Jumbo Shrimp got his ass kicked on a nightly basis. Night after night he was swung around by his ankles and pile driven onto the mat, his face clenched against two testes and a veined sausage by the muscular thighs of a guy twice his size. Three years of this found him at the end of his rope when the tour pulled into the Hartford Civic Center.
That night he wasn’t going to take any more.
That night, when the script called for him to be scrotum squashed and hammer headed into hell, he lashed out and bit off the left nut of Kyro The Giant. Kyro grasped at his bleeding groin and fell to the canvas. Jumbo spit out the man egg, flipped off all four corners of the stadium and made a short legged dash to the eastside exit. Everyone witnessing the event was too stunned to even notice the four and a half feet off flesh and bones running away. They just wondered who won the match.
Jumbo was twenty blocks away before he stopped to catch his breath.
He stumble through a 7-11 parking lot and there was a red Honda civic with the keys in it and still running. Jumbo jumped in and sped away.
That’s when he met Sapphire’s mom.
She was on the side street next to the Dada Mart, freaking out because she had just shoplifted her first bag of Fritos. All of a sudden, this car slows down and pulls up next to her. Like from a bad dream, this midget wearing a cape opened up the passenger door and offered her a ride. Withou thinking, she hopped into the front passenger seat.
“Come with me to Vegas and I’ll make you rich!” he screamed.
Sapphire’s mom, all high from the Frito heist, acted on impulse and giggled when the midget hit the gas pedal. They sped down the side streets like they were in the chase scene from The French Connection. Not a soul was following them but he drove the car as fast as it would go onto the freeway. They must have gone a hundred miles west on Interstate 84 before she even realized what was going on.
“What the fuck!” she suddenly panicked.
She looked over at the spandex wrapped midget breathing heavily next to her.
Anxiety softened and she felt pity.
He looked so harmless, even with the cape and mask. His little legs stuck out straight over the edge of the seat.
They made it to Vegas in three days, only stopping one night in some mangy mom and pop motel off of Intestate 80, somewhere out the most desolate backwoods of Nebraska.
When they got to Vegas, Jumbo made her drive around town for a while until he finally barked at her to pull into some creepy motel that was clinging onto a fading philandering salesman clientele, far from the jingling slots and electric neon sunshine. He said he would be right back and climbed over the wooden fence behind the car. Sapphire’s mom waited for almost three hours before she gave up and made the long lonely haul back to Connecticut.
It was even lonelier when she gave birth to a baby girl and her parents not only refused to come but made it clear they would hate anyone that did.
Mormons suck that way.
Mom married the man she always knew as her dad because her parents made her.
Sapphire hated her mom for making her put up with that touchy creep just because she thought he was her father.
She hated her fake dad for being a loser creep.
Sapphire had to get away.
She just had to.
That’s why she did.
Sapphire hated her high forehead.
She hated her real dad.
She hated the fact that she had been conceived in Nebraska.
She wondered if she had any midget in her.