Seven Dollar Wash

            Again you are at the Westdale Wash in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  It is self-service, open 24 hours, hidden behind a mall and there is no one around at 6:45am.  You select the seven dollar wash: wheel wash, underbelly blast, double pass wash, WeatherShield SuperWax, tri-color foam bath conditioner, rinse and dry.  You’ve just come from breakfast at IHOP where you were once again the only person eating alone.  You roll forward.  Park inbay.  The Rainmaker robot glides by: presoak drizzle.  You do not understand why you can never bring yourself to follow through with the fantasy—the slippery slope of savagery, maybe—why you rely so much on the hope that a carwash can, by sheer force of pressure and volume of foam, make your fucking profound.  You do not understand why you are, once again, alone in a carwash.  Maybe you’ve yet to meet a woman truly deserving of a role in your fantasy.  Maybe you are not deserving.  The tri-color conditioner settles, soft kaleidoscope of pink blue yellow—you smile—and angry brushes hit the glass, annihilate the rainbow.  SuperWax.  Wretched, unscratched.  Spot free rinse.  The radio scans, sings: I walk a lonely road.  You are such a little bitch.  You are a worthless pervert.  Life has no meaning (yours specifically, some lives do have meaning). You are not attractive and your mother’s love is a lie.  You will always know betrayal because there is no loyalty for losers.  You lose.  Your demons will never be shook loose.  Please exit, the carwash says.  Beyond the giant red blowers a digital timer counts down from 60, brief seconds to harness manufactured wind that will never adequately dry your vehicle, never free the dead bugs still clinging to your grill, exoskeletons smashed, twisted together—stubbornly quivering in the blasts.