The highway ramp to the George Washington Bridge was a fume-belching viper, every vehicle a shimmering scale along its back. Boston to Baltimore, I’d had to pee since Bridgeport. Cars inched. I raged. I wept.

I made a plan.

Towels and clothes from my beach trip were in the back. I grabbed them, slithered out of my pants, and carefully built myself a laundry nest. With a shirt across my lap (no luck, tall trucker next to me), I laughed with relief.

I admit it. A penis -- convenient personal hose -- would have been useful.
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At Vince Lombardi, I tidied up.

A Cabrera's poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in The New Guard, Brain,Child Magazine, Colere, Acentos Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Best Travelers' Tales 2021 Anthology, Mer, Deronda, and other journals. Her short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Award and adapted for stage by the Bay Area Word for Word Theater Company. She writes, teaches, dances and ride bikes in San Francisco, but not always in that order.

Sarah Berger is a writer and classical singer living in Baltimore. Her essays “Winter in the Wall” and “Afterlife” were published in Glass Mountain/Shards and Prometheus Dreaming. She is writing a novel about a cohort of music students graduating in the year 1965, and she is a current student in the University of Baltimore’s MFA program in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts.