Shotgun Lullabies

This is an expansion of a flash fiction I wrote awhile ago. It's only a first/second draft (depending on whether you think the flash was a first draft) so I'd love critique on it. Also I kind of love/hate it and don't know which is the better feeling...Thanks for reading!

12+ for mildly dark themes, and the use of the word 'damn'. (:

*****

We were speeding down an empty highway in Nevada or some such nowhere, our path lit by the stars and half-busted headlights. It was Rick Petty’s thing, these road trips. I never got much out of them -- not much but his company, and that was usually enough.

It all started when we graduated from college, I guess, me with a couple honors and a job selling paper, him with a few thousand dollars in debt he couldn’t pay and the title of ‘freelance artist’. Prozac was expensive, and besides, it required a prescription, and Rick Petty hadn’t seen a doctor since his parents’ insurance left him in the dust five years back. So here we were, a few dozen miles over the speed limit, conducting the cheapest therapy either of us knew.

‘Things come out here to die.’

It was the first thing he’d said in hours. His eyes were upturned, focused on the stars, not the road. His hands shook on the steering wheel as he whispered, ‘They come here to die, and it brings them together.’

I looked out the window at the emptiness around us, at the dried cacti and coyote skulls. There was something beautiful in it, I had to admit, in the way the stars lit up the edges of every corpse, spreckled the desert with their white mist.

‘Brings them together,’ he murmured again. ‘Because nothing lasts forever....nothing ever lasts.’

I’d have wondered if he was drunk, but we’d been driving levelly for a long time, and Rick Petty never had the cash for beer.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

He shifted to look at me, and there were tears in his eyes. ‘The stars are gonna fall someday, Tyler,’ he said. ‘I read about it in some science book. The stars are gonna fall and leave us all alone.’

‘Not today,’ I said, because we weren’t talking about stars. Rick was an artist, he could afford to deal in metaphor.

He went on as if he couldn’t hear me. ‘Some are dead already. Some of them’s already burned out forever. But we still see the light -- we still see the light, like a brain-dead corpse still breathing.’

All at once, I understood. Why we were here, why he hadn’t spoken for so long. Why Rick Petty couldn’t take his eyes off the stars he knew, deep in his heart, had already died. There we were, speeding down a god-forsaken road in Nevada or Arizona or maybe even Utah, when I realized my best friend was going to kill me.

He looked me in the eyes again. ‘Things are good right now, Tyler,’ he said, and I’d never heard his voice so childlike and pleading. ‘Right now, we can at least pretend the stars are still there.’

My voice was hollow. ‘A lot of them still are.’

‘Not forever.’ He shook his head, wiped his face. ‘Not forever.’

And I knew that was enough for him. Even as a kid, he’d always wanted to last forever. He was having nightmares about his own mortality when most kids were still fingerpainting suns over smiling stick families. Stood to reason that, pushed to this point, Rick Petty would choose the one thing in the world with any permanence, and it also stood to reason that he’d take me with him.

‘Nothing lasts forever,’ he said, and again the pleading in his voice was more than I could stand. ‘It’s why we’re alone. It’s why every damn person alive ends up alone.’

I leaned my head back, closed my eyes. When i opened them again, the stars were twinkling down at me, and this time there was something malicious in their shine.

I breathed out, long and hard. ‘You’re right.’

I found the shotgun in the glove compartment as he pulled offroad without a turn signal. We got out of the car and stepped into the middle of the road. For a moment we just stood there. I was shaking a little, but he wasn’t.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Tyler, it’s okay.”

“I know,” I said.

He took the shotgun and gripped my shoulder, and there was a crack that split the world and we were gone.