Passengers by Leah Duarte
2022 Youth Flash Fiction Winner
They hate this song. Why is it always playing on the radio? You lean forward to adjust the volume and slant a look at your passenger, as much as you can look at it without your temples starting to throb. Three pairs of round black eyes blink at you in what might, on a face with any other discernable features, be utter innocence.
“Stop,” you hiss through your teeth.
“It was not intentional. I am sorry.” Long, bright fingers spread out in an apologetic gesture.
“If you wake them up, you’re on soothing duty. It’s not like I can let you take the car.”
“I am capable,” it says. “Machinery is predictable enough.”
You stare for a moment in disbelief before redirecting your attention to the road. The road, not the sky above it, all the chunks torn and bleeding streaks that make you nauseous. You’re watching the road. “Yeah, no. Don’t think so.”
“We are wasting time,” it says, resigned.
“What do you want me to do, leave them on the side of the road?”
A gust of warm air, it sounds like laughter summer the once and only time you went on a waterslide and screamed the whole way down. You blink back the sudden sting, say, “Yeah. They’re just babies.”
“You do not believe this,” it says. Its voice has that gentle quality to it that it uses when it thinks you need it.
“What else was I supposed to do?” you ask, hating the pleading note in it but not sure how to erase it, either. Your mouth burns, the taste of ozone, something clearer and purer than rainwater.
“It is not the same,” it says. “You are not the same.”
“Get out of my head.”
“Apologies.”
Pressure throbs behind your eyes, and you think about the little bottle of essential oil rolling around somewhere in the black hole of your glove compartment. You don’t even particularly like the smell of lavender, but your mom always said it calmed you when you were small, swore by it because her mother did years before.
Your hands tighten around the steering wheel.
“Young one,” it begins.
“No.”
It watches you for a long moment with those awful shining eyes, its not-body angled toward you like it’s about to reach out. You keep your gaze forward. If you look at it, at all that light trying to be a person, trying to understand, you’ll scream.
“She would have done this also,” it says simply, before unfolding one strange, elongated arm to reach backwards, adjust the coat you hastily threw over the small squirming things you found on the side of some nowhere unnamed road.
You scowl and keep your eyes on the road, resolutely not thinking about your mother, left behind, or her mother – your passenger makes a soft noise that sounds like your first scraped knee. Not thinking, either, of the taste burned onto your tongue, or all the teeth on the yet-ungrown things burrowing under your coat.