Bad Girl

Some of my blogposts are going to be writing that I am working on. I am taking a fiction writing class through the Writer's Studio and I want to share some of my work here. They aren't all complete stories, some just tidbits of stories. I would love to have your comments and feedback. Please feel free to tell me what doesn't work for you and what does. I'd love to know.

The following story is based on an exercise that we did from the story Sam the Cat, by Matthew Klam, www.matthewklam.com.

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It’s not the sight of all the cactus that gets ya, it’s the sight of nothing but cactus that does. But that’s why I love the road down to San Carlos. I am riding my bike down to Mexico and thinking about the heat and the dust and the fact that you never know what you will find. Will it be six stoned frat boys from the UofA, a rattler curled up next to my bike when I come out of a bar at two in the morning, a shrine to Our Lady up on a bluff overlooking the ocean, or maybe just myself, sitting on the beach with a sixer and a bag of fish tacos.
Folks back home tell me I shouldn’t come down here alone. “There are drug lords, robbers, …. it’s not safe for a woman on her own.” Well, what am I supposed to do, sit and home and wait for someone to come up to me and say, “Hey, I’d really like to go down to Mexico. Wanna go?” That’s just bullshit. I’ll go where I wanna go, when I wanna go. Besides, this time, I had to go now and I wanted to go alone. This ride down through the desert, the heat slapping at my face, the sun bouncing off the tarmac, the sound of the engine humming beneath me, and lots of time to think, that’s what I need right now. I need hours to think, to sort out the last few days.
I knew I would need time to think on my own. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t tell my family about the breast cancer, not yet, not until I’d sorted it out myself, if that was even possible. Was it even possible? How do you sort out a barely 30-year-old woman being diagnosed with breast cancer? I mean, I’d never even had a mammogram before. And now they were telling me that I was going to have to have surgery. Surgery … shit I don’t even have health insurance.
My sister would say that it’s my own fault, for trying to go it on my own, working from home, doing graphic arts projects, instead of getting a “real” job or doing like she did. She says I should get more education, but when she went off to get her PhD she ended up marrying her TA instead and now she’s stuck at home with three kids and spit up on her shirt. Well, she made her choices and I did too and now we just have to live with them, or die with them as the case may be. Wow, that’s morbid!
Grace always held it against me that I hadn’t found a man and settled down. Well, I don’t think settling down is my bag but, hey, I did try to get a man. Markus … yeah he’s a peach, a real peach. He’s older than me, almost 40, but still not as old as my sister. He’s hot, I mean smokin’. He has shaggy black hair that he’d dyed. It hangs down around his eyes in a sexy, shy sort of way. He loves long-sleeved Henley shirts and black jeans. He has tattoos all over his back and down onto his butt. That’s how he got me. I met him at a bar on Fourth Ave and I asked him how far down they went. He took me into the john and showed me. We did it right there and three weeks later I was pretty much living at his place.