What Are You Thinking?
Natalia Arreola
"What are you thinking?" he asked her halfway back home. They had attended dinner with their friends—his friends—which didn't count the number of glasses they drank.
The dinner was delicious. Maybe I'll try, she thought, twining her legs, looking at her long fingernails. His right hand was on her leg, which was always a new discussion in their relationship.
"I don't like having my legs touched like that. You're squeezing me," she told him the first time it happened. But he didn't stop there. She got smaller and smaller and looked elsewhere to calm down, but she always ended up forgetting about it. The problem was not his squeeze or touch. It was the manipulation and force he exerted.
"Are you deaf?" He asked, trying to look at her sideways as he accelerated.
"You didn't say anything during the whole dinner. Don’t you like them anymore?" She wanted to sigh but held it in.
"I told you I didn't want to go. I have a lot of work to do and tests to grade."
"Nobody asked you to be a teacher."
He didn't like her job, maybe because she was trying hard to be creative and bring something new to her class. She decided to spend a few days after school making decorations and taking her students to museums. Or maybe because it wasn't the pay he expected.
She didn't know why they were still together. He was a person without a future who liked to drink every evening to feel the night. But she was a dreamer, an innocent. When they met, she fell in love with him through sweet words and light squeezes—which were intensified by the drinks. Their relationship was like a dream, but for her, it turned into a nightmare. Why was she there? She did not know. She had lost herself over time until she did not recognize herself in the mirror. There were days when she got up and did not remember the day before. Those days, she covered the marks and began her day saying, "Good morning, my life." She no longer knew what was real and what was not because he had absorbed everything through words and charms. Her old self would have hated to see the woman she had become.
"No one asked you to be you," she replied aloud without thinking and immediately regretted it.
His hand clasped her leg. Burying his nails, she moans and tries to stop him with her hands.
"Stop, you’re hurting me."
"Tell me, honey, what are you thinking?" he asked, challenging her. His eyes had stopped seeing the street to see her as he closed his hand more and more. A tear of pain came out of her desperation for air. When she saw the blood run down her leg, she thought, I'm nothing anymore.
"What are you thinking about?" he repeated.
"I'm thinking how I don't want to be here anymore!" she yelled in his face.
Just before he could grab her by the hair and crash her into the window, a truck crashed into them. The truck went straight forward, smashing the front of the car and all the windows. The impact took them out of their seats, through the windows, and on the ground, where they died instantly. It took the truck driver precisely one minute to react. His first and only thought was, what were they thinking?
Natalia Arreola is one of DiN's nonfiction editors. She is studying English at New Mexico State University with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in Psychology. She expects to graduate in Spring 2021. She is also an editor for the literary journal, Chrysalis and is part of the BorderSenses organization, located in El Paso, Texas. She aspires to become an editor for a publishing house and a successful fiction writer.