In the Wal-Mart Parking Lot — Split Lip Magazine

Eight-seater Suburban parked deep-deep in the Wal-Mart lot, legal twenty-four hours or so they say, though every time we see a car coming too close we pull the sleeping bags up, stay strict-still and make like a backseat of junk. We take turns going to the Wal-Mart for sodas and CDs, then the Wendy’s for handfuls more fries. We feel far away from the university, the structure of church school, the questions our bishops ask us about dating and stress. I feel drunk in this car, I feel bold. We’re fugitives, I say, running from Sunday prayer and husbands—I make it sound like a joke, but I watch her face for a sign. We nestle down into our nest like swaddling clothes and late in the night she starts to tell me secrets: how she used to think drinking Coke was a sin, how she’s never kissed anyone but she always lies and says she has. I watch her lips as they move. Her shoulder warm against mine, her hip bone. We both smell like fingers licked of fry oil. How long can this last? We will be good wives, good mothers, good women of God. Why do you lie about it? I whisper. It’s just to watch her speak again. To will us both awake, awake, before the morning crests over the Wal-Mart roof.

Hadley Griggs is an MFA candidate at Syracuse University and the creative director of elsewhere micro-press. She’s been published in Cutbank, Hobart After Dark, Bodega, and elsewhere. She keeps aquatic snails because she thinks they’re neat.