"Man Accused of ‘Car Surfing,’ Damaging Vehicles in Home Depot Parking Lot" by Patricia McCrystal
Click Orlando.com. July 5, 2023. Merritt Island, Florida.
Daniel closes his eyes and spreads his arms wide. From atop the roof of a sleek silver Ford F-150, a breeze cuts through the suffocating heat radiating off the blacktop. He inhales, relishing a hint of brine within the complex waft of his underarms. He squeezes the dried sea sponge in his hand, a once-living creature he found stacked on a shelf inside this big-box store, a primordial relative whose life had been ruled by the mercy and majesty of the ocean.
You can experience paradise anywhere. But first, you have to imagine it.
Daniel opens his eyes. A massive man stands beneath him, gripping the handle of a neon orange shopping cart, knuckles white. The man pulls out his phone and stabs three numbers with a meaty forefinger. He lifts the phone to his ear and points the finger at Daniel.
“Not today, bro,” he growls.
Daniel finds the comment strange. It implied habitual exhaustion, like watching someone car surf was trite; routine. Daniel eyes the distance to the roof of a white SUV parked adjacent, the sun glancing off the glassy top like the waxy finish on his first speed egg. Doubt nearly drains him of conviction but he crouches, holds his breath. He leaps.
The man shouts. The SUV keens and rocks, as if trying to shake Daniel off. He stays low, knees bent, swaying from toe to heel. Perfect posture, he realizes, even after all these years. Laughter bubbles out of him. His body still remembers the sea.
A geriatric couple and three guffawing teenagers flank the enormous man. They record Daniel with their phones. Daniel turns to a soft-top Jeep sitting a foot lower than the SUV. A descent, like carving down the lip of a great breaker. He jumps, flashing the phones a shaka sign as he soars.
The landing is gooey. The roof puckers, and he imagines wet sand sucking at his feet. He hears fabric rip like a zipper yanked open and his chest expands, breath swells. He feels the claustrophobia that clotted his periphery and closed his throat in aisle 6 of the Home Depot wash away in his exhale. He was safe again, thanks to his own ingenuity and divine inspiration from an endcap of sea sponges.
But the man’s comment pulls at Daniel like a strong undercurrent. Not today. As in, I’m up to my ears in car surfing. As in, what a hack. The crowd, now 15 spectators deep, hisses at him.
Daniel scrambles onto the blistering roof of a black Sedan, palms screaming. He rolls onto his back, moist t-shirt offering flimsy insulation from the heat. He hears the sob of sirens. He turns his head and spits. The yellow blob seethes on the pavement. The crowd boos.
Daniel squints at the sky. Pink clouds pregnant with seawater crawl overhead, and he wonders if every act of creation is merely an echo of something in existence, predictable and monotonous as waves throwing themselves against the shore. Perhaps he’d been a fool for believing what his carbuncle-faced, court-appointed therapist preached. Perhaps finding “creative coping mechanisms” wasn’t the only key to Daniel's freedom. Perhaps Daniel knew—had known since his first stint in county jail at 19—that his limiting perspectives, his stunted adaptations, weren’t the only bastilles which could truly crush a man.
Perhaps he’d been motivated to climb onto the truck by something else entirely: by the saltwater coursing inside of him, filling his mouth and coating his back and baffling his vision of the darkening sky above.
Before Daniel is arrested and online videos make him out to be a fool, he pulls himself to a crouch and closes his eyes, arms wide. Headlights flare across the black of his eyelids like the setting sun slicing off the water. Car engines roar to life like crashing waves. He compresses the stolen sponge in his fist, imagining it lolling across the ocean floor. He recommits to his mantra, a lighthouse pulling him forth through the dimming horizon.
Patricia McCrystal is a fiction writer from Arvada, Colorado. She received her MFA from Regis University. Her work can be found in Joyland Magazine, Epiphany, Oyster River Pages, JMWW Journal, Atticus Review, Roi Fainéant Press and more, and on PBS. Her work has won the Slippery Elm Prose Prize and has received a Pushcart Prize nomination, a Best of Net nomination, and a Best American Short Stories nomination. This summer, she was a selected writing workshop participant for the Kenyon Review and American Short Fiction.
