Breaking Out Trailers

by Pamila Payne

She was raised in a trailer out in the Santa Clarita Valley. When she told her grandfather she wanted to go live with her mother, after they'd kept her safe for twelve years, it was like pausing to look in his eyes before stepping in front of a train. She smoked hash and listened to Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells with her mother's boyfriend in a trailer parked in his parent's Van Nuys backyard. He said he had a gypsy heart and then, with his whole Italian family screaming over the TV in the background, he read her palm and told her she was destined to find out secrets. While her mother was searching the San Fernando Valley, threatening friends and enemies with manic violence if they didn't tell her where her daughter had run off to, she was sailing in Marina Del Rey with a forty year old producer. Her first night away from home, she hid in a trailer the producer had perched near the edge of his yard on Mulhulland Drive, overlooking the freeway, the sparkling upside down sky of the Valley and all the secrets she was just beginning to crack into.

6S

Pamila Payne writes dark fiction fueled by personal details and distorted through the lens of an imperfect memory.