Los Incendios | Lucciana Costa

When Los Angeles catches on fire, we’re stuck in the drive thru line at the Taco Bell on Oxnard and Lankershim. Door Dash fucked up our order, so we put on pajama bottoms and drove ten under the speed limit, giggling at depressing news stories on NPR because the gummies already had an hour to leech drugs out of their little bear bodies into our bloodstream. We make it to the grubby window and I get my Crunchwrap Supreme, but then an explosion cracks the 405 in half. Every car alarm in the Valley goes off at once, a psychotic symphony. “Shit,” you say, “we should have gone to the burrito stand. Taco Bell cannot be the last Mexican food we have.” 

Your skin looks like polished amber in the glow of transformers that detonate up and down Victory Boulevard like monochrome fireworks. “We thought it was just a Tuesday,” I defend our garbage behavior, my gummy bears slamming down tiny gummy gavels. Neither of us suggests heading back home to the cracked stucco guest house we still can’t afford, even without a bed frame or curtains. Instead you drive west, snaking down through Topanga Canyon. We laugh at the palm fronds disintegrating into ash, tops of trees lit up like hairpsrayed ladies who leaned too close to the birthday cake. We pull off at the lookout and get out of the car and tiptoe towards the ridge. The city below pulses umber, an apocalyptic dance club. A piece of ash drifts down from the sky and lands on your shoulder, burning a little dark spot into your polo. I lick it. My lips taste like a fireplace. You ring your tongue around the inside of my mouth and we make out as hamburger-sized chunks of something rain down around us. “We should call our moms,” I say at the same time you say, “we should have sex.” I shrug. One’s quicker than the other, so I slide my jeans down into the dirt. My ass grinds into tiny pebbles as you move against me, and I think it’s kind of sweet that you still look into my eyes instead of staring at the Ohio-sized comet hurtling towards the Pacific. Warm little waves of pleasure shudder through me as a ship horn bellows through the searing air. “Any regrets?” you ask, resting against my collarbone. The weight of your sweaty head shoves my neck into a knobby oak root, but I don’t want to move. “I wanted to get killed on Grey’s Anatomy. In like a really dramatic way, after you spend the whole episode falling in love with me, but the cancer finally wins while Bon Iver plays some devastating piano song or something.” I feel you smile into my shirt. “What about you?” You’re quiet for a minute or two. The high-pitched whine of plummeting debris competes with the sound of your breath rising and falling in my ear. I wait for you to unspool an elegant soliloquy, something about your brother’s death or your father’s professional whiskey habit. I wait for you to core me out with something surprising, the way you’ve done many times before. Finally you say, “I think just the Taco Bell thing.” And we grin at each other as Los Angeles slips into the sea, cast off like a dead layer of skin.

Lucciana Costa is a writer and musician who lives in Vermont, but also Nashville, and/or sometimes in a truck heading west down I-40. She has appeared or has work forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Hobart After Dark and Versification. She's one half of the folk/rock duo King Margo. She likes snacks and snowboarding. She wants to chug a beer with Ben Folds. @LuccianaCosta.