Big Sur

By Charlotte Bruckner

​Shortlisted for the 2026 "London" Literary Prizes in the International Prose category

The tattoo is infected—this much I know. Past the haze of the joint Ross rolled for me and the fog suffocating the pines, I know something’s not right with my body. Besides, I’d looked on Reddit already, and all the signs are there. I’ve been scratching at it for days. I flick a flake of dead skin out the window like a speck of ash. Ross is my secret boyfriend. We’re road-tripping down the coast because I didn’t want to go back to my parents’ for spring break. My options were 1) reveal Ross to my family, and let them stage-whisper to me about his lip piercings and busted knuckles all week, or 2) tell my mother I got too many shifts at the restaurant to come home, and meanwhile enjoy one week of roadside diner food, loud music, and sleeping under the stars. Or I suppose there’s option 3) go home by myself (without Ross, and without speaking about him to anyone) and probably throw myself into traffic by Tuesday. Suffice to say, I chose freedom. I tuck myself into the backseat with a beer. Ross has one of those trucks with a backseat, though you have to climb over the center console to get there, kicking magazines and half-empty chip bags to the floor. What I really want is a cigarette. I recently took up smoking knowing exactly what I was doing, knowing what my mother would say if she saw me willfully poisoning my good pink lungs. As if she hadn’t given up everything—booze, tobacco, even pills—when she was pregnant with me, so I would have a perfect, clean, unblemished body. I’m trying to leave that all behind. I’m focusing on becoming a crowded room.

I got this tattoo on Sunday before I left town. Dylan, one of the dishwashers at my job, just bought a tattoo gun, and I promised I’d take one of her shifts if I could be her first client. It’s a cool design: a swallowtail butterfly right above my knee. Too bad right now it feels like a mosquito bite after you’ve scratched it raw and bleeding. Maybe Dylan’s basement (or her needles, or her rubber hair-dying gloves) was unsanitary. I check my phone. No one’s texted me, or maybe there’s no service on this road. I didn’t tell any of my school friends where I’m going, and I’m a little irritated no one’s checking in. I prefer to hang out with randos from town (like Ross) who won’t judge me for missing classes or bailing on plans, who already know which bars don’t card and which parking lots are best to hang out in. But Kelsey and Mia from World Religions class are probably safe at home in Pasadena or Glendale or wherever, not thinking of me at all, while I’m speeding down the 1 like a silver bullet, breathless and gleaming and impossible to catch.

The windows rattle as we jolt over a pothole. I start paging through one of the magazines. It’s full of pictures of lithe, fairylike men. They’re trying to sell me cologne or sports cars, but I’m looking at the divot of their clavicles, the smooth strong chest beneath the clinging v-neck, the gap between their front teeth. One time I asked Ross if he’d ever sleep with a boy, and he lunged at me like he was really gonna hurt me. I punched him in the eye. Later, as he sagged onto the edge of the bed with a bag of frozen peas cupped to his head, I felt really bad. I haven’t brought it up since. Still, between shining, translucent moments, stoned or on the precipice of sleep, I sometimes imagine myself as a powerful man dressed in leather, forcing Ross to his knees.

I start to drift off, at first thinking of Ross done up in drag, wearing blue lipstick and brass knuckles, then onto more vague images—the blinding green of the golf course, flush with the sky like the heaving flank of a fat animal. The sharp taste of chlorine, the exact smell of a hotel indoor pool I swam in once as a child, floating warm in the stomach of a huge creature. I used to be afraid of everything: needles, elevators, the sound of automatic doors opening and closing. Once when I was eleven a stray dog I was trying to play with bit me, and I concealed the wound for weeks for fear I would have to get a rabies shot. I was terrified of any unknown substance entering my body, especially through a glassy syringe. Instead, every day I searched my eyes in the mirror for signs of insanity—hydrophobia, foam at the lips. Nothing happened, though for the next month I shocked myself awake each morning after dreams of howling at the moon, deliriously grateful to still have the mind of a human.

Now, I wake up feeling dizzy and sunburnt, the magazine splayed out over my knee like a broken-winged bird. Ross is outside, stacking twigs for a fire. He looks up as I jump out of the car, pins and needles radiating up my femur. I eat a stale half-bag of Takis and set up the tent. I spend a moment just sitting inside, watching the light filter through the mosquito-net door. It looks liquid, drinkable. For a moment I think I could be happy just like this.

When I emerge the fire is blue and low. I’m bored, I tell Ross. Maybe I’ll ask him to read me the first thirty pages of his dingy Lord of the Rings paperback. Maybe I’ll ask him to fuck me in the bed of his truck. He stands up expectantly. I scratch idly at my knee, forgetting the tattoo, which pulses irritably. I think I’ll go on a walk, I say.

I steal one of Ross’s hoodies and start down a snaking dirt path. We have a few hours of sunlight left; my shadow is tall and lanky. Ferns feather out below me and black birds croak above. After she wrapped my thigh in saran wrap, Dylan did a tarot reading for me. I don’t remember most of it—I have no use for swords and coins and languid empresses atop ruby thrones—except that the last card she pulled was the magician. That one, she said, represents my potential for change—pure willpower. The veil between the physical and spiritual worlds is thin, the time to take action is now. While Dylan rattled off about how happy she was to have someone to try out her divination on, how I’m like a younger sister to her and she’s so glad she met me in the dish pit, I was looking at the magician. The figure is small, but he has hair like mine, lopped off carelessly just above the chin. One hand thrusts a candle into the sky, and the other hand points to the ground, specked with multicolored flowers. I’ve never thought of myself as someone who would hold a candle in the air.

The trees bow in the wind, cathedral-high. I realize I’ve been following the sound of rushing water. I’m in the most beautiful part of the state and all I can think about is dumb magic cards, and what I’m going to do to entertain myself for the rest of the day. I’m standing on the bank of a river, pebbled sand crunching under my boots. I shrug Ross’s hoodie off my shoulders and shimmy my shorts down my hips, tossing both onto a rock. I dip my cupped hands into the river, grains of sediment moving through the water like dust through light. I look behind me, as if checking if someone is watching me. No one is there, obviously. Then, taking myself by surprise, I dive into the water.
​
My thigh lights up with pain. The water is freezing, like actually ice cold. My hair is plastered to my skull, stringing into my eyes. Breathe. The water rushing sounds like traffic, or maybe it’s just the highway, still only a mile away. I’ll probably always have problems I don’t tell anyone about. Like the dog bite, or the tattoo, or this whole fucking road trip with someone I barely know. Poor Ross, I suddenly think with a pang. I’ll probably leave him long before I figure out what I am. Though the current is knives against my skin, I dunk my head in again, and come up gasping. I spit out a ribbon of water. It tastes like soil. After I haul myself from the river in a few minutes, shivering in my sopping wet t-shirt, I can scour the woods for blackberries and stain my teeth purple. I can go back to the fire and play cards with Ross, or lock myself in the truck with the rest of the alcohol. I can change my name, shave my head to the skin, never speak to Dylan or my parents or the girls from school ever again. There are about a million ways to supernova myself to oblivion. I might get sepsis from the infected tattoo; I might emerge fromthe water finally scrubbed clean. But for this moment—half floating, half treading water—I feel my chest smooth, my features sharpen, my body blending with the brackish water and the gunmetal sky.

---

​Charlotte Bruckner writes about cowards, queers, and losers. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in Redivider, Vagabond City Lit, Broken Antler Magazine, Nowhere Girl Collective, and elsewhere. When not writing, he works in theatrical costume design.