“It is absolutely criminal. That road is wide and straight and gorgeous. It begs you to do more than forty on it.” She had that glassy look in her eye she always got when dreaming about taking a road at an obscene speed. For the most part, everyone in the shop had become accustom to ignoring her speeches.

This particular road was a stretch of Poplar out in the suburbs. Fives lanes wide, and so straight you can see down it for miles. They’d all been down it, all felt the dare of that speed limit. And everyone that’d taken that dare also had a ticket and a court date to go along with it.

Those were shark infested waters, as they liked to say.

“I wonder how fast I could get up to late at night, when there’s no one out and the lights’ve all gone blinking yellow.” She pantomimed the gear changes, wetting her lips at the thought of that speed.

“Fast enough that any wanderlust you might have would get cut horribly short by an extended jail sentence.” The shop boss threw a rag at her. “Not unlike your employment if you don’t get back to work.”

Memphis Note
Everyone that lives in Memphis knows the stretch of Poplar in Germantown that this story is about. Just past Exeter, until it merges with Poplar Pike, is a place where if you aren’t actively watching your speedometer, you’ll find yourself easily into the fifties without even noticing. It feels like highway you should be doing a bare minimum of fifty-five on, but if you even get close to that, you’re looking at a rather expensive ticket from the always vigilant Germantown Police Department. I swear they built the road like that to keep the city funded.