On highways

‘Blue lips to count blue cars,’ I whisper, pressing my finger to her mouth to steal an ice-cream kiss. Her kiss is a memory of the time we lifted a Cornetto from Joe Saviour’s fridge and lay on the grassed embankment above the highway, counting cars with stolen sugar on our tongues. Zooming-zooming streaks of red, zooming-zooming streaks of blue. Our greedy eyes gobbled the white stripes. We used to believe that the highway went somewhere, that over the horizon was escape, places we’d never been and thought we wanted to go. - Rachel Zadok, Sister-Sister