Shishir 2022 Stories -D.R. Garrett

 

Salvation Mountain
By D.R. Garrett

 

I’ve been at the Beaumont two weeks now with no sign of when I will be released.The people who run this place must have a contract with a pharmaceutical company, and we are their guinea pigs cause the drugs they give us make me feel like someone sucked out all the pleasure centers of my brain and filled them back up with cotton.


Me and Sherry are locked in our room because we refused to take our meds this morning. I watch a blue jay land on a tree branch outside our bedroom window.


“Do you think this desk is heavy enough to break the glass?”


“Are you nuts?” Sherry asks.


“What’s the worse they could do? Put you back in the Cool Down room?”


"You don’t wanna go there.They strapped me down to this table all night long. All I did was call my mom a bitch for calling the cops on me for running away.”


“Where were you running to?”


"I was going to see my dad. He lives down in SoCal in this place called Bombay Beach.”


“What’s your dad like?”


Sherry clenches her fists till the knuckles turn white, “I don’t know! I never met him.”


“Sounds fucked up, Bombay Beach. Like a nuclear test site.”


“No! It’s not like that. There’s a mountain out there made from old tires called Salvation Mountain. It's painted red like a heart, and the people who live there don’t have jobs, or have to go to school, or nothing.”


“We could go there.”


“They’ll catch us and double our meds.”


"Look out there. The fools didn’t even build a fence around the premises.”


“What if we can’t find my dad?”


“We’ll have each other.”


“God is love.”


“What?”


“That’s what’s written on top of Salvation Mountain: God is Love.”


“Does your mom love you?”


Sherry picks up the desk chair, raising it over my head.


“Shit, Sherry. I didn’t mean it.”


“God is love!” Sherry screams, throwing the chair through the window.


We tumble barefoot and bleeding through the window frame, sparkling and jagged with a million shards of glass.


God is love, the wind whispers in our ears.


Our feet spell out the words, God is love as we run as fast as our hearts will carry us.


The blue jay soars above us, its wings spreading infinitely into an ocean of blue sky.

 

D.R. Garrett from US is a poet, filmmaker, and writer who has been putting pen to page for over two decades. Her award winning films have screened all over the world and her writing has appeared in Modus Operandi and DMZ. For her writing is a means of transcendence. Her work centers around themes of spirituality, trauma, and addiction. When she is not writing you can find her working on film and television sets its a production designer in Austin, Texas.


 

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