The Ticking Crocodile

by Miss Melpomene

The expectation of drowning was optimistic, she thought. That was only if she missed the rocks, which as Dwayne pointed out was unlikely given her current trajectory. What was likely was that she'd die. Her body would be smashed on the rocks like a baby bird, her brief life as a half-vampire cut shorter because Dwayne couldn't take a joke. Part 2 of the West Coast Vampires Saga.

3. Jaws In A Station Wagon

"Don't criticize what you can't understand."

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Chapter 2

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THE MAN

The sunrise painted the inside of the station wagon gold and orange, the peach-colored light of the first rays reflected off the dust and crusty white dried water and wiper fluid on the windshield, blinding the man. He lowered the visor and a takeout menu for a Chinese place fell into his lap. He ignored it, taking his right hand off the steering wheel and turning the radio on just as the song that was playing was ending. The quiet, too-close-to-the-microphone voice of the nighttime DJ belonged to a woman. In a half hour or so a louder, more appropriate for the daytime voice would replace her, most likely a man, but he'll have already turned the radio off by that point.

The air coming through the crack in the driver's side window made the air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror swing from side to side like a fast metronome. A plastic key-chain with a photo in it also hung from the rear-view mirror, in it was a picture of someone else's family. The man smiling in the photograph was not the man driving the car, not the man to whom belonged the heavy brown duffel bag sitting on the floor in the backseat of the station wagon.

There were few other cars on the road, it was too early in the morning, and most of the other drivers belonged to families on their way to the beach, which was easy for the man to tell from the luggage strapped to the roof of their car or the children sleeping in the backseat, their little heads on pillows pressed up against the windows, a cooler in between them so they wouldn't fight on the long car ride.

As the sun rose, the temperature inside the station wagon did too, and the man used his left hand to manually roll down the window halfway. The rosary wrapped around his wrist and thumb caught on the lever but came loose when he angled his arm downward so the beads slipped down his arm and collected at the base of his hand.

The cold air hit the man's face and swept through the rest of the station wagon, filling the car with the rotten smell of saltwater and the pine tree air freshener, which swung violently now and made the faces of the family in the photo in the plastic key-chain look like featureless, flesh-colored demons.

He reached over and turned the dial on the radio, flipping past the end of an advertisement for the boardwalk paid for by the Santa Carla Board of Tourism and a song by Simply Red. He stopped on a station that was playing Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" and turned the volume up nearly as high as it would go.

The man tapped his hands on the steering wheel in time with the guitar strains, the rosary dangling from his left wrist swaying with the song. The station wagon ate up the one lane road, and the man looked out the window as Iggy Pop sang "he sees the winding ocean drive," and a dirty green sign that said: Santa Carla, 5 miles, passed by his passenger side mirror.

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Thank you for reading.