cuentos Dolores

   Allison watched the church dome disappear behind some buildings as he emergency-turned down a street, his anger growling away at the accelerator. The sauna heat in the car cooked her insides. She didn’t ask him to slow down or open a window. She recognised the clenched silence between them, they had happened all the time on long family drives down the coast road to Largs with her parents. Her dad would be tightening his rage towards the ambling traffic and her mother would be looking out the passenger window slowly dissolving to tears. She would try to sit statue-still in the back seat and hold her breath between trees, or cars, or houses and try to get her bare summer legs to the other end of the journey smack free.
 
 She never thought she could be back there again with a man she thought she loved, shifting in her seat desperate not to uncork his pedal-stomping rage. She tried to rethink him to all those times before the last fifteen minues when she had listened to him shout and his mother plead. He grabbed her and dragged her out his mother’s house. She tried to shrug him off and ask what had happened, to which he didn’t even seem to register. He had the zero-gravity gaze that nothing could touch.
 She found that she couldn’t look out of the car window. The lidded thrum of inside noises nagged her. The car went over a rise in the road and lifted off the tarmac. It jolted down with a bark of rubber and he caught the friction of tyres and road and pumped for more speed.
His gaze was beyond the road; he was wringing the neck of the steering wheel. Allison realised that she was holding her breath and told herself to breathe.  
Dolores lay behind them now and she hoped that his anger would burn itself out. With sudden clarity it came to her that she knew absolutely nothing about him, only what English he’d spoken and what she’d seen with her own eyes. She moved herself in the sticky seat.
 She looked out the front window and saw an old white van waiting to pull onto the road a little way ahead. It slowly started to pull onto the road, as she knew it would. She looked over to him who either hadn’t seen it or was aiming for it. She wanted to yell at him to slow down or open a window and scream for help, but she was holding onto her breath as always and nothing came. There was no control. One, two, three, four... -counting the heartbeats in her ears, her bare legs crossed together desperate for the journey’s end-six, seven..-the car hit another rise and left the road, she pulled up her legs as if trying to keep it in flight away from the van- eleven, twelve...-  she was crying for the first time since she was a little girl- fifteen..-she made a grab for the steering wheel, gulping and sobbing…
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