You are reading Fiddleblack #9
We would drive around a lot and
smoke cloves, listen to the bands
you wanted me to like,
to be a little more like you.
I loved the music more when you left me,
but not in the way you liked it,
I don’t think.
I don’t know—you were only twenty-two and
I was seventeen and there
weren’t enough hours in the day
for driving around.
We could never go far enough away
from Memphis, Tennessee.
I was never the escape
you wanted to be my getaway driver
for, I was never allowed
to cross state borders
without a note.
You couldn’t understand why I loved
the smell of gasoline so much,
the dry green trees, soft dirt,
those deep blue skies
where you saw only planes.
Christiana’s third book, Death of a Ladies’ Man, was published by 3:AM Press in autumn 2012, having previously been serialized in 3:AM Magazine in spring and summer 2012. Christiana is also the author of The Wrecking Ball (Beautiful Books UK, and Harper Perennial USA, 2008) and the graphic novel The Socialite Manifesto (Beautiful Books, 2009). She graduated from Cambridge in 2011.