How to Go Through the Drive-Thru Car Wash Without Your Car
Leave it back home in the driveway: this is your chance to be purified. Approach the drive-thru entrance on foot, like it’s a cathedral of cleanliness. Shift your body into neutral, and get ready for the ride of your life. As you are splashed and soaped and buffed and waxed, exorcise all the dirt that has accumulated in your bones, your skin, your fingernails, your toes. Clean every last surface of your most desirous thoughts: your mind should shine pristinely, all dreams of chocolate cake or tight-sweatered strangers or public figures you wish to strangle safely sequestered in a supply closet at the back of your brain, a place you can’t access without a skeleton key, or two-factor authentication. Ever since you were young, you’ve dreamed of this moment. Ever since you were strapped in the back seat while your mother—harried, hurried—ran your red Volvo wagon through its glow-up shower after retrieving you up from elementary school. You remember watching the show through the cranked-up window, the mops of rubber hair that slopped wet all over the car’s body calming you somehow. Becoming a vehicle wash voyeur also made you think of your excursions to Lion Country Safari, the sadness of that drive-thru zoo; what, you wondered, did these regal but strangely emaciated beasts make of your huge-wheeled and armored animal as it slowly idled through their artificial, exurban habitat? Now, you’re a grown-ass adult pretending to be a Porsche, and paying $19.95 plus tax for this strangest of baptisms—or at least you’re test-driving the idea as reverie. Hand an extra fiver to the guys who finish hand-drying you, and thank them for their efforts. Well: do you feel cleansed? Are you ready to face the horrors and pleasures of this blemished world with fresh-faced and sudsy energy? Or do you desperately want to get dirty again—to go roll around in a puddle of mud somewhere, like the filthy, sinful creature you are?
Matt Leibel
Matt Leibel’s short fiction has appeared in Post Road, Electric Literature, Portland Review, The Normal School, Quarterly West, Socrates on the Beach, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, matchbook, and Wigleaf. His work has also been previously anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2024, Best Microfiction 2025, and Best Microfiction 2026. Find him online at mattleibel.com.
