Our first of two Honorable Mentions for the 2025 Summer Short Story Award for New Writers, Nathan Kimball’s “The Hurt I am Rendering” will make your breath catch and your heart beat a bit quicker. The narrator is driving both literally and metaphorically, as she and her passenger race to Las Vegas, escaping a painful breakup. By employing direct address, Kimball plunges the reader right into the newly ended relationship, so much so that the reader, too, feels the sting of not fully understanding what went wrong.
No matter how much soul I force into the gas pedal, trying to shove it through the bottom of the car and into the asphalt churn beneath, I can’t seem to outrace the ache of you. It chases me out of the shallow Missouri hills and into the great flat plains of the greater midwest. Does peace wait in Vegas? I certainly hope so. Sometimes, the thing that haunts us is everywhere, omnipresent: rolling down the branches of the trees behind us, lying on the bleached pavement ahead of us, infiltrating the air around and inside of us. I’ve tired myself out trying to understand it. I’ve burnt my tires smooth from rough driving trying to get away from it. Speed. I just need a bit more speed.
Anna, my passenger, says something I can’t quite catch. Her words are a blur, but I think she’s asking about you. How did you meet? That’s always the first question, isn’t it? After you confirm that you are taken, indeed off the market, they want to know the details. They want to know who, what, when, why, and, perhaps most importantly, how. What qualities do you look for in a partner? Oh, a she? You’re a—? How did you win her over? It gets a tad exhausting. Why do people always go about describing and asking about these things in such mercantile terms as if romance—the space between two (or more) people—was some sort of transaction to pass or fail. But I am just being cranky and am almost always happy to oblige. I like to think that the memory of the first time is a happy one. I say:
You hate it when I call you by your first name because I met you while you were working, and so everyone was calling you by your stage name. No one pays attention to the DJ in clubs. They’re a part of the set like the fog machines, the funny drinks, and the little lights. Everyone on the dance floor is more concerned with touch than with sight or even sound. Everyone is concerned with feeling. Feel the beat. Feel the ass of the person in front of you. Feel the alcohol and feel how free it makes you feel. Dance, girl, dance. I hate dance clubs. They make me feel like a dunce, but where else are you supposed to go at night?
One night, for some reason, I found myself in a club looking up at the disco ball hanging from the ceiling. I had a little too much to drink and someone had turned off every other laser color except white, so the ball glowed softly like a faraway sun. The floor was bathed with a shadowy blue light. I could swear while I stared at the disco ball that we were no longer on solid ground but somewhere deep underwater. The club was an ocean, and I was lost somewhere beneath the surface. You know that faraway feeling you get when you know someone is looking at you? The kind of feeling that feels like an interrogation. I looked down and across the room I saw you looking at me from your DJ’s perch. We were the only ones motionless in a school of jumping fish. You slapped me across the face with your smile and reached over the room so you could give me the kiss of life. Then you let the bass drop.
Later, in the alley around back, we kissed each other for real. You slid your fingers through my hair and your lips tasted like medicine. We both had been drinking all night long so the taste was probably mutual. It was desperate, grimy, and hot. Two guys looking to smoke or for a quick exit or something else stupid like that stuck their heads out and saw us. We stopped and you waved. One of them said something under his breath about dykes before retracting his head back through the threshold. And then, after the door slammed closed, we laughed and laughed, and I saw how your nose tightened and wrinkled when you laughed, and I blushed from my want of you so we went right back to kissing because the guy was right.
“Call me,” you said. You scratched your number into the soft of my palm and then sealed it with a kiss while looking at me with your deep brown eyes. In the dimness of the alley, they looked black. I will, I said. I want to. Desperately, but I kept that last part to myself and you turned and you wiggled just a little when you walked away. I made sure the sound of your heels had faded and you were all the way gone before I collapsed to my knees, shivering from the delight of it all. Like I said: It is a happy memory.
“That’s the most romantic thing I think I’ve ever heard,” Anna says. I smile. I tell her I’m sure she has a similar story, one that would easily trump anything I could ever share. She takes a drag on her vape and then hands it off to me. I take it without question—I am due for a pick-me-up. I suck in the smoke and the stink of it cuts into the back of my throat and into the small iridescent cavities of my lungs like a long, sweet, and cruel whisper. I breathe it out through my nostrils, and suddenly I feel close to the cloth of the ceiling like someone had roped an invisible string through me, starting in my tail bone and ending where my spine slots into my skull, and then they proceeded to pull my posture straight. I think the proper word for it is luminous, and it’s fucking fantastic.
“I don’t know,” Anna starts. “I mean, I have been seeing this guy—”
I ooooooh at this: a high-pitched whistle of a sound meant only to tease and provocate. Anna hits me in the thigh with a soft punch but she’s smiling so I understand that she’s not serious.
“It’s not like that,” she says.
Lying, I think.
“Okay, maybe it is a little like that. I don’t know.” She takes a good long look out the front windshield at the roar of the road, and her gaze takes on the sort of hazy, dreamy, faraway quality that people get when they’re physically here, when they’re materially present in space, but mentally they’re untethered, floating through the soft sea of memory. Her chest rises with a sharp breath, a single staccato note, before:
“Okay, so we met at an art show. We kept on making accidental eye contact while just walking around. You know, the kind of eye contact where it’s done to just, like, scout. The kind that supposed to say to the other person when they catch you looking: You look pretty good to me.”
She says it all in the exhale. I know exactly what she is talking about. It’s the kind of look that lingers inside of you. It washes you away with its honest hunger leaving you hung out to dry, carved out and craving. Maybe, it’s carnal. Anna cradles her head in her hands and stretches her cheeks away from her eyelids with the pads of her fingertips.
“Ugh, like it was so weird seeing someone our—someone my age at one of these things. Especially someone cute. Usually everyone is at least a decade older, and I feel left behind like I’m still a child in a room full of real adults. The boy kept meandering away and I didn’t want to lose him so I ended up ambushing him in front of the bathrooms.” She shifts backwards in her seat, squeezed silly by emotional angst. “It’s so embarrassing.”
It sounds like you like him, I tell her. So, what’s the issue? I leave the end of the question dangling in hope that she’ll cut it down. Anna tilts her head toward the ceiling from want of something—exasperation, maybe? She blinks rapidly and her irises shift along to the lumps in the fabric and the bumps in the highway. Is her mind racing; tracing along all the threads of thought? It is a state I’ve been in far too frequently as of late.
“I don’t know, dude,” she says with a sigh. “We’ve been on a couple of dates, and we’ve talked a lot. It’s just like… I dunno.”
I ask her if her reluctance is because of her dream and when I do her body bolts upright. I’m aware for the first time since we started driving that she isn’t wearing a seatbelt, but it’s okay because I’m not either. She says:
“I mean, that’s definitely part of it. I feel like I have nowhere to go and yet there’s so much for me to do and I’m just a ball of nerves right now because I’m going to be moving away soon, so it feels a little stupid to be starting something or starting something with the potential to be something no matter how much I want it right now, and I definitely don’t know what the future looks like even a week from today let alone what my feelings will be further down the line. Who’s to say everything will always be the same?”
Anna pulls her legs up to her breasts and leans the side of her head on her knees. She grabs her vape pen and starts to use it like a pacifier. She coughs several times in a row because her lungs can’t handle the fresh intake while twisted and compressed like that. If you were here with us sitting in the backseat, lounging and contorting yourself out of excess comfort, you would say something reassuring and noncommittal to break the tension. We would all laugh at our grandiose self-seriousness. Then I would properly introduce the two of you for the first time. Anna would lean around the seat with an outstretched hand but you would refuse to shake it. Too much effort. Her hand would remain empty and limp. The two of you would sit and study each other and she would drink in your amber hair, bleached brows, and lip piercing before turning back to me with a raised eyebrow as if to confirm that we really were like that. The cool type, eh? Incredulous at my own fantasy, I try to imagine you jealous; it feels like a stretch—like an awful long way to reach.
I long for a drink to numb out the squeeze in my esophagus. Outside the light is dying across the plains and the lack of meaningful shadows disturbs me in a way I can’t quite place.
“How many more hours until Vegas?” Anna asks.
Too many, I say. Or maybe I think it. I don’t know anymore. I’m always speaking with the voice I keep deep inside of myself.. Most of the time, everything feels like something I’ve already thought about a long time ago.
“Fuck. I want a drink.”
The laughter sputters out of me wildly and uncontrolled like an old fashion faucet. How did you know exactly what I was thinking? I ask her and she shrugs. Great minds must really, irrationally, think alike. Maybe only when they’re sober. I say there are seltzers hiding somewhere in the backseat, and she shakes her head no.
“Only as a last resort,” she says.
Anna asks me about what I want to do first when we get to Vegas and my mind draws a blank. What did I want to do in Vegas? Why am I driving all this way? I look at my grip on the steering wheel, notice how white my knuckles have gotten, notice the chips in my finger polish, finally feel the tension in my hands from the constant caress of plastic. I take one hand off the wheel; clench and unclench it several times in a row; feel the tightness in each of my joints boil away. I don’t want to be past my prime, but sometimes it feels that way. Sometimes, none of my bones fit the way they are supposed to, and I feel my years in every snap, in every crack, and in every thump.
I make up my mind. When we finally reach Vegas, when we get into our hotel room, when we kick off our clothes and shoes, I am going to draw the longest, hottest, sluttiest, fucking bath ever, and just allow the heat from the water to penetrate my mind and make me feel like a real person again—not the shell of a thing I currently am. Then I am going to sleep, then I am going to get up, dress up, and the two of us are going to drink until our livers fail.
“Lol,” Anna says (she really does say it like it’s a word and not an acronym) and clasps her palms together. “I might not be able to wait for you to finish the bath.”
I ask her why, wondering what she is hiding from me.
“It’s just that I wanted to go out right away while it’s still dark and just look out on the whole strip, ya know? I want to take it all in while I still have the comfort of the first sight and the newness of it. I feel like sleep would ruin it for me. Sleeping would make it seem real. Like a place where people live and work, and have lives, and fall in love, and make families, and such. I want to savor the temporariness of it all.”
Her words linger in the car’s air filtration system. They are sucked up and spit out—constantly recycled and sanitized until the shape of them no longer makes a lick of sense. There is an image rising, and even though I keep telling it to go away and leave me alone, it comes on back until it’s complete. I repeat it endlessly like a song I want to vacuum the meaning out of just so I can keep the bite of the lyrics from hurting too much.
The image is of you and me standing in the strip, or maybe it’s in Fremont, it’s hard to tell the difference when the neon and the stimulation stings the same. Vegas is a city built upon an Eden of desires. People saw a wasteland and asked themselves what could possibly grow here, what could possibly thrive here, except for notable, untamed excess. I agree. All the lights shine down on us, drenching us like rainbow colored rain, and you smile even brighter than you usually do. The pavement feels sticky to the touch and we are both icy from the desert night air. You press your hand against my shoulder and kiss my sleeve and tell me that this is the most at peace you’ve ever been. Me too, I say. I hold your hand just to feel the warmth in each your capillaries. We go back to the hotel room to fuck. You leave bruises on the tender flesh on the inside of my thighs.
I tell Anna that her idea is a good one, and that I’m totally down, but internally all my organs are shuttering up. She says she knew I would come around. My veins rush and my heartbeat whoops. The throttle gets away from me. Anna turns away and puts on a thousand-yard stare. We drive like this for some time, the two of us looking straight ahead, our gazes narrowing on the darkening sky outside. Grey turns to blue turns to yellow turns to black. The glare comes straight on through the windshield, and I pull down the visor to shield my eyes. My sunglasses are hidden away somewhere in one of the many bags that weigh down the trunk. They’re just another thing I packed away forgetting I would need them.
The entire car is silent except the ever present hum from the (ignorable) friction. I wish I could have just kept talking so I wouldn’t have to deal with this awful pulsating silence. It’s the kind of silence that makes a person squirm for noise. I check the time. The land is so flat you feel close to the curvature of the Earth, and it feels like at any moment I could unlock the door and throw myself onto the concrete. Nothing would change except for a single splatter. Our acceleration strips the world of color and shape. It’s a mighty metamorphosis into meaninglessness—a cleverly disguised study into the feeling you get when you’re moving but also stuck. We should probably stop for the night, I say to Anna.
“Fuck it,” Anna says. She gets up halfway and steadies herself by grabbing the car seat headrest. I ask her what she’s doing.
“I’m getting a drink,” she says, and she worms her torso over the central console and her head disappears into the gap between the front and back seats. She pulls out a white can of something both stale and fizzy from a case.
“Want one?” she asks as she pops her first tab and smiles. The can tsks at her. “You know you do.”
I do. But I can’t drive on them, I can’t steer us on desire alone. We get off the freeway and I drive us to a motel. Even splitting the differences between nexuses of humanity, someone can still find a place to rest their weary feet. It’s dark now, and it feels like I’ve choked down a couple of shots of NyQuil. I can barely manage to stagger from the car to the maw of the motel’s threshold. I stumble past the bed to the bathroom, and I hear Anna open another can. She’s lying on the bed when I finish. You can see the scuff marks on the opposite wall where she kicked off her shoes. The case is on the bed beside her. One hand is on her drink while the other quietly contemplates the pulse in her neck. I almost want to laugh. She’s like a modern renaissance painting—an artist’s rendition of post-adolescent angst.
Are you all right, hun? I ask her.
She doesn’t answer.
Anna, are you crying? I say softly, and the hand on Anna’s neck travels up to cover her eyes.
“No,” she says.
Are you lying?
“I’m not.” She begins to shake. Her sobs sound like a child choking on seawater—quiet, dull gasps, noisy, new fear. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. It feels like I’m being pulled in every possible direction and I can’t survive the tension. There is just so much pressure, and I don’t want things to change but I know that they’ve got to, and I’ve got to change with them or else I’ll be left alone. All I will ever be is a child stretched tall. I—I don’t get it. ”
She passes me the case, and I take one. The seltzer tastes like pineapple and a future headache. It goes down like salt water. We sit in silence for a bit, taking sips from our cans of shit. I feel myself starting to think about you. This isn’t a surprise—I see you everywhere. You are always approaching me when I least expect it, taking me from behind, from within a faceless crowd, running away from an idle car. If I love you and you love me then why are we taking a break from each other? Why won’t you message me back? The distance grows malignant and I can’t find a scalpel sharp enough to cut through the steel-hard outer shell and into the gooey thing underneath the dermal layer. There is something sick about what I feel for you.
I look at Anna and this what I say to her:
Listen, you’re real. It doesn’t matter that you are, but you are, and while this might feel like a curse, it is also beautiful. You’re an adult. You’re young. Both are true. The future is unwritten, and even though it hurts right now, you should be at peace knowing that these feelings will eventually pass you by. You’ll look back at this night, at these days, and you’ll think about all the hurt you feel as an abstraction. No matter how much you imagine it, the future will always be different than what you want it to be and—
“Katie,” Anna says. “You’re crying.”
“I am?” I say, and I really say it this time. I hear my voice outside of my body. “Oh fuck. Oh god.”
I touch my cheek and realize she’s right. It’s wet. Something insane rinses its hands off inside of me and the oily runoff rushes through my every vein and nerve. It wells up in spaces I didn’t know I contained. It leaks through gaps I thought were long close. It washes through everything, it flows everywhere. My whole face contorts at this newfound, newly discovered sense of wetness. What the fuck is happening to my body? I sink against the far wall. My whole body starts to shake from the buzz. My voice sinks low and heavy alongside my legs.
“I don’t want to be alone anymore,” I say.
“You’re not,” Anna says. “You absolutely are not.”
“You’re right. We’re here. We’re going to have fun.”
“Fuck the future.”
“Fuck her until she can’t stand on her own.”
We raise our cans and drink. Mine shakes while I get my breath under control.
Anna gets up and stumbles into the bathroom. Several seconds go by before I hear the wretched sound of bile catching in the back of her throat. I go in and she’s draped over the toilet. She’s trying to hold her own hair back and she can’t. If love is built upon knowledge, then why do people grow more and more distant the more stuff you tell them? They scoot farther and farther away until, at the end, you practically need to scream your secrets for them to be heard. I turn on the fan and go over to her. She’s groaning to the air, and I kneel beside her. I stroke her back with my left hand the way I picture a mother would. She grabs my right arm with her right hand and digs her acrylics into the skin. My hand turns death white from the pressure. She’s going to leave a mark. I hold her cold, little hand through the waves of nausea. The air hums.
“It burns,” she groans.
“I know,” I say.
I lead her to the bed and prop her up on her side. One should never put a drunk person on their back unless you’re trying to drown them with their own vomit. There are sequins in her ears. Is it better to keep them in or take them out? I never got to have my own earrings before. When I was a kid, I was too curious for my own good. I stuck my hands into my mother’s sewing drawer and took out a needle. I was tired of being othered, of being the only kid on the block with empty earlobes. Shiny. Shiny. Shine. I didn’t realize you had to boil the needle beforehand. I didn’t realize how much it would bleed, or how much it would hurt when I tore through the skin. I didn’t know it would get infected. My lobes are split in half—scars of negative space where the needle went through. I’m jealous of everyone’s ears and how they hear things so clearly.
I lie down and my body throbs. I was already exhausted but now I’m sapped. The rhythm of my heart shakes the whole room. Is there really a bed beneath my back? It seems like I’m lying on sand. Wave after wave breaks over me. How long has it been since I’ve swam in the Pacific Ocean? I’ve been in the Midwest for so long and now I’m going to the mountains just to drive into the desert. The closer I get, the farther away it feels. It looks like I’ll need to wait a little while longer. The paint on the ceiling is chipping away—it is a motel, after all. The paint takes on the shape of new, fictional archipelagos.
You left without giving me any time to prepare. One day we were fine, and the next we were not. I was blindsided. You told me that things were getting stifling. You wanted to take a break to find yourself again. You wanted to focus on your music and the sounds you could make other people dance to. I agreed. I could do nothing but agree. Who am I to tell you what you want? Who am I to you? Why do I still want your hands up my shirt and why do I picture them—bony, soft, and lovely—reaching over my waistband? I still have one of your shirts, but there is a stain on it now because I wore it out one night hoping to rid it of your scent. Some asshole tripped and spilled his whiskey on me, and all of a sudden every meaning the shirt once held disappeared as if it was never there at all. At least the asshole apologized. Every time I think about how unfinished we are, it feels like fresh salt in the wound. I do it to myself.
“Anna,” I say. “Are you awake?”
“Yeah,” she says.
“I can’t sleep,” I say. “Do you want to keep driving? See how far we can make it?”
Anna sits up.
“I thought you would never ask,” she says.
We drive fast. We drive dangerously. We’re like a fire arrow shooting through the dark. A single bright spot illuminating the void. We both woo with delight. I drive with my left leg tucked underneath me. I think I savor the numbness most of all. I roll down the window and open up the sunroof and the outside comes pouring in. The wind wooshes through the window and chops at our eardrums. Chop. Chop. Chop. The strength of the wind makes my air-freshener go insane. A cartoon desert island, it flails and twists itself around my rear view—its sandy beaches yellow, its palm leaves green, its coconuts impossibly ripe. Anna says something but I can’t hear her.
“What?” I yell, but the sound gets lost in the uproar. It’s a little disconcerting being so close to someone and being unable to hear them speak. She could scream and I would be none the wiser. She shakes her head and motions upward with her thumb. She stands and pokes her head through the roof. She yells, and I can feel the reverb of it in my teeth and in my gut. My blood rushes in a new, good feeling way. I hold the car steady for her. Her hair whips back and her arms span out to encompass everything in front of us. It looks like she’s about to take off and fly away. If only she had the speed. Anna ducks back in.
“Do you feel that pounding like a jack hammer?” she says. Her hand is over her heart. “It’s like we’re alive.”
“We are,” I say, and then there is an image rising:
* * *
We drive until one of us needs to go. After we stop, I get out and the air feels both new and old. It’s dusty and cold like a brutish breeze. Anna steps out of the car and disappears into the grass with a squat. I look out to the places ahead of us. Somewhere beyond the curve the Rockies lie in wait. In the distance, oil wells wheel around. They’re like metal birds with iron beaks pecking at the ground, sipping from the soil. All of this used to be underwater. Before the well, before the plains, before the desert, before the people, the Midwest used to be a part of the ocean. I walk past where Anna is doing her business and into the field. The grass gropes at my ankles. I hope it’s just grass doing the groping. The night comes flooding through me. It settles in my head as a deep throb. I feel so very out of place; so very out of time. In the distance, the horizon is a length of black wire—drawn taut—garroting the throat of the road.
Sometimes filmmaker, often artist, always writer—Nathan Kimball is obsessed with the human experience. Born and educated in (and by) the Pacific Northwest, he holds a BA in Creative Writing from Western Washington University. If he is not at home or traveling, he is out exploring, trying to find new stories which make him breathe just a little faster.