The car carried Arletta through rainbows.

When the car glided through the late night, she was bathed in purple, proud in its majesty. Stars whispered to each other of the royalty slipping below them. She could smile and wave in the orchid stillness riding in her private parade past the few who lifted their eyes from their feet to watch.

Sunlight streaming into the car turned her world yellow and golden-haired. Reflections of the streets were shimmering avenues of saffron. She followed the golden path, guiding the car over heat waves in secret scavenger hunts of rapture.

Thunderous evenings in the car brought her steel grey. Doves and stormy seas played together in the mists and set her veins throbbing with the desire for flight. She pushed the car, hurtling past neon caves and tin hovels dressed in satellite dishes to a destination the world still hadn’t found. She and the car, racing the clouds on the wind, bound for destiny.

Twilight rides were special. Twilight rides captured all the violets, reds, yellows, greens, and oranges of the rainbow for her. The colors whipped past in rotating streams, sky to earth and back. The colors sang so loudly she could hardly keep the car straight on twilight rides.

This drive was black. Scarred hands gripped the wheel in the ebony interior. One eye, open beside its swollen, bruised twin, saw only obscured shapes, wavering in and out of the raven colored kingdom beyond the hood. She and the car searched for a track leading deeper into the velvety darkness. The red bricks of life melted into sable. The blood he had drawn dried into deep jet circles on the seat.

Each breath was a knife and she ground the pain into speed. She and the car slammed forward, hunted and hunting. They reached further into the inky emptiness, until they rolled over a plane where the murkiness and onyx could envelope them. They rode the oily stillness downward, relaxing into the cold. A kaleidoscope of colors broke around her as she and the car nestled into the shadowed cushion below them and Arletta thought of the rare twilight rides.

“That white car just shot off the cliff into the lake, Officer. Never even tried to stop.”