secret motel

It was a summer night in Arkansas or Oklahoma. I wore no shirt, no shoes. I shot a lawman who cursed my mother. I drove a stranger's truck fast under the streetlights and past the collapsing porches. The dark mountains were full of witches and moonshiners. I followed the stars to the lake, the final resting place of my dead twin sister. They said she still sat upright in a convertible parked at the bottom of the lake, tiny fish tangled in her hair, a burlap sack of stones tied around her neck. I would make the secret casinos by dawn, a motel room where my exhaustion had already checked in.