Driving Barefoot

Published in Landlocked Magazine, 2019

You like to drive barefoot. There’s something about flying down the highway and pressing your bare soles to the ridges of the gas pedal, feeling the car rumble under your feet. You like to kick your shoes casually under the seat, socks tossed on the empty passenger side, toes finding every fiber of the carpet and every crumb on the floor. It feels powerful, driving barefoot, like you’re doing something bad, something rebellious in the way that will get all the good southern ladies at the country club to click their tongues and whisper in disapproval, “That girl. She likes to drive barefoot.” You like to press that gas pedal into the floor, feel the car humming around you, the wind rushing around the outside. You like to eye the trees on the side of the road, and sometimes you think about what would happen in your hands were to let go of the wheel, to let your feet take control as the car spun onto the grass and into those trees. You think about the looks on the faces of the firemen pulling your barefoot body from the car, your shoes thrown through the windshield and into the uncut grass around you. No one will notice and pick them up, and so there they will remain, a monument to recklessness, until time disintegrates them to nothing.