Before dawn, after a sleepless night, young Mei turned quietly out of sweaty sheets, pulled on her ballet slippers and crept softly into the garage. Sitting there in the dark car, not wanting to wake the birds with the grinding of the mechanical door opener, she gripped the steering wheel, hands at three and nine o’clock, and turned left, then right, in rhythmic succession to music singing in her head. Inside her house, family slept in every room—father, step-mother, two sisters, grandparent, cousin, widowed aunt and her three babies, various ages, not to be disturbed. But in this dark garage, inside the closed car, next to the stacks of brown storage boxes, piles of broken shoes, a Halloween witch, the chair with a short leg, and the bicycle whose tire needed a tube, she had, for a moment, a ballroom of her own.
With arms of seatbelt wrapped around her waist, windshield eyes upon her face, key tapping in the ignition, the air vents whispering to the beat—she swirled and turned, dipped down and stretched up, wiggled and shook, finally loosening her hair. The pins and rollers, shaken free, flew against the dash, sounding like cymbals, tinkling against their partner. They left a trail of metal and plastic across the coffee mug holes, down the side of the center divider and onto the carpet pad at her feet. The pins looked like flying ants, still moving, in the half darkness from the safety lights.
She realized she had lost her slipper when she felt her naked toes against the brake pedal and wiggled them against the cold. She rooted around with her foot, but could not find it.
At six, when the sisters woke up and wanted breakfast, she heard them searching for her, calling her name. They finally opened the heavy garage door, pressing the lighted square button that raised the door with its scraping chain. She heard their voices behind her. As the morning light crept across the silver hood, she lowered her head to the fabric of the wheel, her lips touched the cool leathery skin, and she gave him one last kiss, before they parted.
Jeanne Althouse lives in Palo Alto, California and is working on a collection of short stories. Her work has been published in literary journals including the Madison Review, Opium, Canary, the Stanford English Department Newsletter, The MacGuffin, Pindeldyboz, Temeros, Flashquake, Literary Mama, PIF Magazine, Redlands Review and Porter Gulch Review. She has stories upcoming in Red Rock Review, So To Speak and Flash—the International Short-Short Story Magazine. She can be reached on email at cfo1975 at sbcglobal.net.