King of Piss

After breakfast at Flying Biscuit. After the park in Decatur. Back in the car, and we got stopped at a light. Dad’s Jeep Grand Cherokee purrs like a tiger under us. The red light is like a laser, burning into our chests. I try to breathe, breathe, but my breakfast eggs are sliding around in my stomach and the thought of Dads coffee thick with sugar makes me want to chuck it all up. I feel something rumbling outside, it is a grocery homeless person. His Publix cart is strapped to the hilt with belts and jumper car cables and a folded tent and a highchair and a slip n’ slide box and a mop. He carefully unbuckles a section of his stash on wheels and brings forth a beat up, sun faded bucket. He then turns around and gently bends his knees. He must have had a bottle of lemonade, because as he turned around, I could see a stream of lemon-yellow liquid coming down from his pants. He then yanked the mop off the cart, sloshed it around in the bucket, and slapped all that liquid onto our windshield.

Dad jumped so high he hit his head on the felt ceiling, and mom shrieked. Molly and I just looked at each other.

Dad says so many words I can’t even remember what they sounded like, but they felt like fire and singed my skin. When the light blinks green he guns it and nearly leaves a trail of rubber from where his new tires were stationed. We go home in silence, just the squeak squeak of windshield wipers to cut through the stinky air. But this only made it worse. He didn’t wash the pollen off that week, so the little strands all got mixed in with the lemonade and clumped together to create an even darker amber color. Dad barks at us to not get out of the car until he washes it off. When we park in the driveway of our home, he rips the keys out of the ignition, leaving us in the sweltering heat of a Georgia summer. He yanks the hose from inside the garage, rings it like a rag onto the outside spout, and blasts the crust off his windshield. He did that about three times, just to be sure the only liquid coming off the car was crystal clear like a bottled water commercial. I couldn’t help but laugh and laugh until mom gave me the stink eye to stop, but even under her makeup, I could tell she too wanted to show her pearly whites.

The next weekend, we washed the car by hand while mom was out getting groceries or sleeping off a migraine, I don’t remember. Sis and I put on our matching cherry red bathing suits, tied old moldy sponges to our palms and got to work. Dad sprayed us in the face with the hose a couple of times, which is against the rules, but we got him back by writing bad words on the back of his car with soapy toes. When he wasn’t looking, I scratched my back on the side mirror and Molly drank from the hose. And to this day, Dad drives that car around, the soap letters long since washed off. But I know it once read, “King of Piss.”

 

Madeline O’Neill is a recent graduate of Georgia Southern University with a degree in Creative Writing. Her favorite way to go about writing, is to start with a vivid image she finds in the wild, then let the glowing orbs of imagination dance around her head while she writes feverishly and whole-heartedly.