2016Bluestone

The Car Wash Vacuum Kevin McDaniel Always before new things begin, this guy drives to a car wash. He imagines the crumpled gas receipts, the aluminum gum wrappers, and dried up red coniferous air fresheners in the backseat crevices and under the floor mats as dampened, decayed foliage. The vacuum is a gale-forced wind that sucks up all the matter and pukes it up elsewhere. That elsewhere he conjures as another’s car, something for that person to rake loose, to tease out, or to live with like Philip Dick’s kipple. A punched-drunk hard-shelled bug from the passenger’s floor clogs the vacuum’s esophagus. This guy lays his palm over the mouth to check for that sucking whoosh, but feels…nothing. He knows a thing this small can’t live in a vacuum.

I currently live in Pulas- ki, Virginia, with my wife, 2-year-old daughter, and two Chocolate Labradors. -Kevin

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