No, you’re the one who’s deathly afraid of running out of things to talk about while we’re out for dinner. The couple finished with their duck, looking in different directions just begging for the waiter to return is not us because we’re in the woods and there’s this monster truck tire someone literally abandoned here. The tire is the exact kind of thing we always wanted to stumble across drunk except now we have our leftovers in this Styrofoam container that absolutely need to be kept cold unless we want parasites.

You got your plum stained fists braced in your pockets as this woods is spooky enough without the monster truck tire. Our hair will bear the smoke of Jouls BBQ & Sushi, farm animal and little propane cans until we’re so old. If there were flowers growing in the tire’s massive well I’d pick them out and show you how cool they were but there’s no flowers there’s just these weird weeds. With the cars hissing swears above us on the overpass, we finish what we came to this forest to do – whiz out all those drinks. I set the leftovers down on a rock just long enough to rinse my hands off on my coat’s inner lining.  

Then you were like, hey we should move to California because talking about moving to California is our favorite thing to do when we’re drunk in the woods. But there was so much cool garbage there to explore, remember? We found that computer tower, some liquor bottles, a carpet sample, five ski masks, an ammonite and some pretty expensive looking patio furniture. I think we even drank a little of the Dubra. But the monster truck tire kept sucking us back in. A black hole we could both easily fall into.

How many cars do you think this thing crushed in its heyday? I asked.

Who knows, probably a million. I’m freezing out here, let’s go! You said. 

Now you’re the one who wants to get pregnant because we’ve run out of things to talk about. The couple looking in different directions, begging for their Jerry McGuire kid and his colossal glasses to return so they have anything to talk about is not us because seven years later we remember we left the Styrofoam container in the woods. We found out that monster truck tire came from a real monster truck called LA Marsh Zombie that crushed over ten thousand cars in its heyday and in one of the cars there was a person who wasn’t able to get out in time.



Travis Dahlke is a writer from Connecticut with work appearing in Joyland Magazine, Outlook Springs, SAND Journal, Sporklet, and The Longleaf Review, among other literary journals and collections.