She drove south, feeling the car eager to go faster. She wanted nothing more than to step on the gas, and open the car up the way it was meant to run. The headlights tunnelled forward. They were suspended in a peaceful, unknowable dark, where all of her worries evaporated, and there was only the car, and the dashboard light, and Ash, and the thin songs from the radio.
–Mayfly
I think a lot of writers have songs in mind when they start putting things together. It’s too expensive/impossible to quote lyrics the way I’d like in Mayfly but the songs are there in my mind just the same. It grows as I write and as I edit and even as I read it again this last time or two. This probably isn’t even its final form, but it gets me closer to those days in the late 90s, when Marianne is ready to start her life, if only she can figure out how. None of that chirpy optimism, but a measure of hope and terrible fear all at once.
Of course, she has more to worry about than your average small town girl.
For the right atmosphere, imagine the crackle of old records, TV speakers, crappy CD players, and the tinny radio of a ’69 Mustang clinging to radio stations in the dark.
Rei Fletcher 