Blast | October 22, 2026

“Buckle Up,” is a story about two relationships of well-intentioned dysfunction and how they compare in a spontaneous moment.

TMR’s online-only biweekly series, BLAST features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

Title image: Tempo, mild, ren Virginia cigarett (1932), Alf Ellingsen

***

Buckle Up 

Rick and I are trying to get to Costco for bulk pastry to bring to brunch club, but the city marathon is today, and we’re trapped like ants in an ant farm. We’ve been driving idiot circles around our neighborhood for over an hour, and street after street, we’re rebuffed by race barricades and stock-looking cops grinning the same dog grin from behind their sunglasses. Sunshine, overtime pay, and runner butts, their faces say, and God Bless America. 

Having peered up so many blocked streets into the race lane, it feels less like a marathon and more like a pageant for fifty thousand youngish, whitish professionals. “Imagine spending a hundred bucks to run twenty-some miles in a row?” Rick says. “Just, like. Why?” Rick has money and routinely bikes dozens of consecutive miles for fun. He’s just blabbing to distract himself from this race day clusterfuck. 

As ever, I play along. “It has to be fitness for at least some of them,” I say. “And then the usual stuff? Christmas letter fodder? Hinge bait? At least the registration fees go toward—” 

Rick screams and slams on the brakes. He throws his arm protectively across my chest like it would make any difference, which is most of why I love him and all of why I married him. 

Stopped sideways in the middle of the road is a small rust-brown car with its hazards on. Oily smoke billows from its nose, which is mashed like Play-Doh around a utility pole. Some kind of green fluid and what I think is gasoline bleed from beneath the vehicle onto the ground in iridescent swirls. 

A lady is staring in disbelief at the wrecked car from the sidewalk. Rick slows to a crawl next to her. “Hey,” he says. “Is that your car?” 

“Not mine,” she says like Eeyore. “Think I wrecked it, though.” 

“Rick? Can you maybe stop the car the whole way?” I snap. 

“I was getting there, Heather,” he whines. He wasn’t getting there. He jerks the car to a stop, and I get out and go to her. 

“Are you okay?” I ask. Now that I’m standing next to her, I can smell the booze. 

“I think I wrecked your car,” she says to no one. At first, I think she’s talking-to-herself drunk, but then I look down and see she’s on the phone with someone saved as King Jay, BooBoo Bae.  

“Don’t play with me, Beth,” says a deep voice through the car’s speakers, presumably King Jay. 

“Uh, she definitely wrecked your car,” says Rick. 

“The fuck are you?” asks King Jay. “Sound like a cop.” 

“I’m Rick,” says Rick. 

“When did you finish drinking last night?” I ask Beth, who has started to sway. It’s 8:48 a.m. 

“We never did finish drinking, be honest with you,” she says. She takes a few sloshy steps away from the wreck and turns back to face it. She squeezes her eyes shut hard for long seconds and opens them again. “Yeah, baby. I definitely wrecked your car.” 

“Motherfuck, Beth!” King Jay roars from the car. “Again! S’wrong with you?!” 

“I told you I didn’t have to go,” Beth says coolly. “Told you I didn’t need to be driving.” 

“I didn’t kick your ass out,” King Jay yells. 

“Fuck you didn’t,” Beth says, suddenly sober-sounding. 

“Did you hit your head?” I ask her. She ignores me again. 

“Got anything on you, baby?” King Jay asks. 

“You’re on speaker,” Beth says absently. She’s produced a cigarette from somewhere that bobs on her lip when she talks. 

“Got anything on you, baby?” he asks again, half-whispering. 

“Rest of that bottle,” she says. The cigarette sways along with her words like a conductor’s wand. “Plus whatever’s floating around your car.” Beth starts patting her pockets and spinning in circles. I think she’s trying to find her lighter, but it looks like she’s doing the Macarena. 

Now a big blonde hippie with a dog on a rope sidles toward us through the smoke. Not sketchy sidling. Hyper-considerate sidling, meant to let us know he doesn’t want to draw more attention to the scene but is too worried about our well-being to keep away. 

“Guys good?” the hippie asks. 

“No one’s hurt,” Rick says. “She wrecked pretty bad, though.” 

“The fuck does ‘pretty bad’ mean, Rick?” King Jay demands. 

“Whoa whoa whoa,” Rick says, looking at me and the hippie with big eyes. 

“Not too too bad,” the hippie says to King Jay. “Lots of smoke, though. Guys sure you don’t need help?” He smiles fuzzy teeth at us but is already sidling back the way he came. 

“Thanks but no thanks, bro,” King Jay says with finality. The car speakers crackle, and more liquid spurts from its undercarriage, red this time. 

“I’m going to jail,” Beth mutters, still patting her pockets and spinning in circles. 

“What do you mean?” I ask. 

“Anybody got a damn light?” 

“I’m calling 911,” Rick says as he hands her his Bic, which he keeps on a retractable lanyard so people don’t walk off with it. 

Beth takes it and lights her cigarette. She pulls hard, inhales, pulls again, and exhales a massive cloud toward King Jay’s wrecked car. “Wait wait,” she says, face hidden in a cloud of smoke. “Can you take me somewhere?” 

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” Rick asks. Helping a drunk stranger flee the scene of an accident is one hundred percent illegal, but I’ll do it if she asks me again. 

“It’s a great fucking idea, Rick,” King Jay yells. 

“Jeez, hey,” Rick says. 

Beth looks at me. “My mom just passed,” she says. “It’s too much.” She’s been poker-faced, but now big tears splash off her chest, and her bottom lip pouts out like a little kid’s. I lost my mom five years ago. I take Beth’s hand and look at Rick, whose mom is a young fifty and has a sign in her remodeled kitchen that says “It’s wine o’clock somewhere.” 

Beth moves to pocket Rick’s lighter out of habit, but because of the lanyard, he’s yanked toward her, and suddenly we’re all embracing, Beth gulping boozy sobs, me smoothing her head, Rick wrapping us both in his wiry arms. 

“911, what’s your emergency?” Apparently Rick picked five seconds ago to actually call the cops. He left our car running, and the dispatcher’s voice comes from its speakers. 

“No emergency here, ma’am,” King Jay crackles politely from the wrecked car. Thick smoke hangs in the air around us. Shiny pools of many colors creep closer. “False alarm. Wrong number, and our apologies.” 

“There’s been an accident,” Rick blurts. 

“Address?” the dispatcher asks. 

“412 Summerlea—” 

“Dammit, Rick!” King Jay yells. “Beth! Fuck outta there! Cops and shit? Kidding me?” 

“Please do not attempt to flee the scene of the accident, Beth,” the dispatcher warns. 

I break from our huddle. I grab Beth by the shoulders and spin her gently toward me. “It’ll be worse if you run,” I say to only her. “You know it will.” 

“Got a DUI night of Ma’s funeral,” Beth says calmly. “I’m going to jail.” 

“Ain’t no little jail you’ll be going to if you don’t get your ass outta there, Beth,” King Jay moans. “Two DUIs in a month, you’re going to prison.” 

The concerned hippie from earlier is back somehow, sidled in with his hippie girlfriend while we were all hugging. “I told her you were okay, but she wanted to see,” the hippie says. 

The hippie girlfriend’s outfit is nineties-resurgent: pornographically low-cut jeans and two or three tissue-thin pastel camisoles. “Looks bad,” she observes. “Guys hurt?” Her voice is quavery, like she’s talking through a slinky underwater. We ignore her. 

“Do you have a driver’s license, Beth?” the dispatcher asks. 

“It’s in the car,” Beth answers. 

“Anything else in your car?” I ask under my breath. She doesn’t move. I wink at her and drink from a pretend bottle. 

“Ope,” Beth says. She splashes through rainbow puddles in her bedazzled Crocs toward King Jay’s dying car. 

“Heather,” Rick says to me, gone suddenly white. “Her cigarette. The gas.” 

“Beth!” I scream. “Get away from the car!” 

“Fuck outta there, Beth!” screams King Jay. 

With a single unhurried finger raised toward the sky, Beth tells us to wait a second. She’s vanished inside the car from the waist up, legs kicking as she roots around in the backseat. 

“It’ll be bad at first,” Rick says. “Probably really bad. But then it’ll be better.” 

“Why are you telling me?” I ask him. “Tell that to Beth.” 

Beth is walking back to us, palming half a fifth of whiskey up her arm. She whistles innocently. I cough loudly at her and mime an underhand toss. She hucks the bottle into the weeds without looking and rejoins us. 

“It’ll be bad at first,” Rick says to Beth. “Probably really bad—” Sirens cut him off. He looks at Beth’s sparkling feet and doesn’t continue. 

“I’m going to prison,” Beth says. 

“Talk to me, Rick,” King Jay yells. “Fuck’s going on over there?” 

A woman with a car full of kids pulls up out of nowhere and yells out her window to Beth. “Need a ride, baby?” she asks. 

Beth smiles at the woman but shakes her head slowly. “Gotta stay, mama. Be worse if I run. That’s what these two said. Gotta take my licks.” 

The woman starts to shake her head, too. “Got room for you, girl,” she says. She eyes us with pity. The kids in the back of her car all squish to one side. One of them wears a Spider-Man mask bunched up on his head. He pulls it down and pretend-shoots me and Rick with his web-slinger hand while pointing for Beth to get in with the other. 

“Beth,” King Jay pleads. “Think about the kids, Beth. Brittany and Angelo. You think about them, and then you get your ass in that nice lady’s car, Beth.” 

Beth’s eyes widen. “What if it was someone else’s kids I hit, stead of that pole? You all’d still tell me to fuck off outta here then?” She shakes her head more quickly, and I picture King Jay shaking his head on a ratty couch somewhere, too. 

The woman in the car gives up and speeds off. Spider-Man shoots us a few more times through the rear window for good measure. 

The utility pole Beth hit stands at the corner of a row of squat brick townhouses. Pogo sticks and tricycles jut at odd angles from the big shared lawn, its tall grass gone to seed. The door of the house closest to us opens, and a middle-aged woman in a bathrobe and headscarf comes out. Her knees have evidently gone bad, so it takes her a minute to stiff-leg off the stoop and down her front walk. Behind her comes a man with a razored head, the back of which hosts a great shiny boil. The two stand there and gawk, mouths open. I want to yell at them to mind their business, but King Jay’s car is pretty much in their front lawn. 

“Alright, Beth,” King Jay says. “Don’t say I didn’t—” 

Beth jabs the red button on her phone and hangs up on King Jay. “Always trying to tell me what,” Beth says to us. “Told him I didn’t need to be driving.” 

“It’ll be bad at first, but then it’ll be better than before,” Rick says again. He’s not wrong, and he is just trying to make her feel better. Still, I picture myself hitting him hard in the face. 

The cop cars and fire trucks finally get to us. They roar in and block the street, lights blazing. Rick points out the obviously spurting fluid to a fireman and then starts talking to a broccoli-headed cop who looks sixteen. I stand there and rub Beth’s back absently while wondering what prison food tastes like. 

“You and King Jay have kids,” I say to her. She shakes her head and says yes, they do. More big tears plunk down into the oily pools at her feet. 

Boil Head is poking around in the weeds, right around where Beth threw the half-empty whiskey bottle. Bad Knees is recording everything with her phone, stilting around to get license plate numbers and close-ups of all of our faces. I’m trying to wrap my head around what the fuck is wrong with people when Rick comes back over from talking with the cop. “They say we can go,” he says. Beth perks up. “Um. Me and Heather. Can go.” I look at his nose and picture smearing it across his face. 

Beth takes a cigarette from her pack with her teeth. She takes out two more, shoves them into our surprised mouths, and then unhooks Rick’s lighter from its lanyard and lights his cigarette. “She’s a good one,” Beth says to him. “You hang on to her.” 

Next she turns to me and lights mine. “I think he means well,” she says with a hammy grin. 

“I think he thinks he means well,” I say back. 

“Jesus, Heather,” Rick says. He hits his cigarette indignantly but has apparently forgotten he coughs like a kid when he smokes. He doubles over gagging and drooling. 

Beth grins again at me, and I can picture her as a kid on the playground, sweet and safe. “He’ll take care of you, though,” Beth says to me. “Could do a lot worse.” Her grin bends bitterly as she looks at her phone and then at King Jay’s wrecked car. I hit my cigarette and consider all the acts of kindness she’s ever received, all the love she has left to give. 

“I’m sorry about your mom,” I say. She nods her head. I kiss her temple, which smells like salt and cigarettes and dryer sheets. I picture Spider-Man swinging down and scooping her up. 

A different cop walks up to us, young and broccoli-headed like the first. He’s holding a protein shake and wears a shirt small enough to show off his little tennis ball biceps. He asks Beth for her ID. It’s in the car, she says. He escorts her toward it. 

I pull Rick toward our car and get in. I look in the rearview mirror and see Beth get in King Jay’s driver seat. In her hand is Rick’s lighter. She lets it loll toward the glistening puddle under the car. The cop is looking at a reflection of his arms in the car’s side mirror and doesn’t notice he’s about to maybe get exploded. 

I picture Beth’s thumb gently sparking the lighter. I picture the fireball. Picture Beth’s kids wracked with sobs while King Jay watches sports and swipes on Tinder. Boil Head and Bad Knees exploding into pieces while the cops duck for cover.  

I’m definitely not about to sprint back to tackle a Bic from a drunk lady who’s actively considering self-immolation. Instead I picture blasting Beth with love, a pillar of pure compassion that geysers from the middle of my forehead, reflects off my rearview mirror, and crashes through the smoke into her body. 

In the mirror, I see the cop say something to Beth. She shakes her head. The cop squats down and says something else, puts his hand out for the lighter. Beth nods. 

She hands over the lighter and gets out of the wreck. 

I get in the driver’s seat and pull away from the curb. 

“Babe,” Rick says. 

“Yes?” I look at his nose. 

“That was insane. Those neighbors.” 

“Yes,” I say, packaging into the word a plea for something I’m now certain Rick lacks. 

“And her kids. So sad.” He clucks his tongue and gives my hand a squeeze. “Anyway,” he says, “about those pastries. Were you thinking pain au chocolat or the little berry crumble things?” 

I seriously consider speeding the car up to about sixty and steering into oncoming traffic, or maybe off a bridge. Rick would shriek and wail for his small life, but I bet he would still seatbelt his arm across my chest even as I plunged us to our doom. Instead I take Rick’s hand and squeeze while he tries again to route us through the marathon. 

***

About the Author

For source material, Tyler Ayres has been a machinist, an English teacher, a fine dining waiter, an intelligence operator, a café musician, a freelance editor, a glass cutter, a Mandarin translator, a yoga instructor, a forklift driver, and a knife peddler, among others. He lives for the moment in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.