Well, for my first tale, a short story I wrote a couple years back as part of a game of sorts. One person would post a couple pictures or write a short paragraph and everyone else would write something inspired by them. Both times we tried to start the game it failed due to lack of activity on the various boards, but I still like the idea and hope to find somewhere I can start it without fear of it just dying. Anyway, its kinda rough since I posted it then and now without much editing, but its probably best to show my evolution as a writer. Yes, this is how my first drafts tend to look. I’d post the two pictures that this was inspired by, but I don’t know the original source, so I can’t credit them.
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I sat in the driver’s seat shivering, the temperature had dropped over twenty degrees in the time I was at work. Even the blood coursing through my veins had begun to freeze on my way to the car. This was gonna be one shitty drive home. I cracked a few dozen joints, took a deep breath, then pulled out of the space. I made it half-way home with no major issues, a little sliding the worst of it. Then, I decided to take a short cut, a small back-road connecting routes thirty and twenty-two. Up until then the roads had been nearly perfect – at least for the conditions.
The scenery was amazing, a quaint cottage sat off to the side, no more cowering for the hedge-grew fence out front then standing tall and protective of it. It was a might unsettling for some unknowable reason, yet still had its charm. That is, of course, when I noticed the girl.
Where she was its a damn good thing I did notice, too. She had placed herself out into the lane I myself occupied, sitting beside what I could only presume was her wrecked transport. I swerved uttering many a dark and vulgar phrase, then resumed the road determined to have naught to do with the damn… but no, its so cold out there she wouldn’t last half an hour, and that house has been abandoned so long…
Sighing, I reverse back up the road to where I can see her crying, or at least as close an approximation as is possible when the tears freeze still hiding in their ducts. I’ll just say it, she looked like shit.
“Excuse me, miss?” At this point, I’m not even sure how I got out of the car, I don’t really remember it, but I must have. The girl continues to ignore me, leaving me to even darker thoughts, ones I had hoped never to think again. “Miss? Are you okay?”
“Its twenty below, my car broke down, and no one cares enough to come and pick me up. ‘Okay’ isn’t exactly the right word.”
“Fair enough, so do you need any help?”
“Unless you happen to know how to fix a partially melted engine… I really doubt it.”
“I didn’t abandon you…”
“… what?”
“Whoever refuses to come and get you… it isn’t me. You really don’t have to be so bitter.”
For the first time, the girl looked up and really noticed me. I could tell she was about my age, maybe a little younger, but the lines on her face made her appear much older. Our eyes met, and I could see some great suffering. Finally she climbed to her feet with a great effort. “I don’t believe I got your name…”
“Colin.”
“I’m Sara, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Same… so, if there’s nothing I can do for you here, can I drive you somewhere?”
“I… have no where to go, and for that matter, how can I trust you?”
“I can see there’s a long story here somewhere, and its far too cold to exchange stories at the moment, so can we at least go somewhere warm, maybe get a bite to eat?”
“Are you asking me out?”
“It’s not everyday, you find a beautiful damsel in distress, I couldn’t help it. If you would prefer, I could get back in my car and go for help, send someone back maybe? Will you trust me, or would you rather never see me again?”
“I’d rather never having met you in the first place, but there’s no helping it now. Where can we go?”
“There’s a King’s at the end of this road, if you have no objections.”
“None.”
The drive was quiet, she shivered in a ball next to me the entire way, as wrapped up as she was I could still tell she had the beginnings of frostbite, if I hadn’t found her when I did… I couldn’t help but look at her every time I glanced at the rear view mirror, she really was beautiful, this mysterious Sara, what was her story? How did she end up with such a totaled vehicle in the middle of nowhere? Thoughts kept pounding through my head, all slowly turning simply to a picture of her. She really was beautiful.
The restaurant was nearly empty, no one wanted to be out in this weather, the waitresses stood at the podium ignoring us for some juicy gossip… a couple young cooks took an… unscheduled break. I don’t think I’ll be ordering from the meat cooler.
Our seat – I’d sat there before, years ago – the hanging lamp, a myriad of colors, looked like another cheap imitation of something beautiful. The benches were comfortable enough, although the padding was worn enough that I could feel the wood underneath. Sticky rings denoted the caffeine fixes of prior diners. In general we found ourselves in a shit hole, and I wanted to leave, too many memories.
She didn’t seem to notice my own turmoil, before I managed to reel it in and put a smile on my face. I watched her for a moment, as she took in the same aspects of our new world as I had, although her eyes lingered longer on the Christmas tree behind me, although if that’s what she was really seeing, I can’t say.
We sat there is silence for a long time, both wrapped up in thoughts and memories, somehow comfortable with one another, for the first time I was able to think clearly and remember.
My sister kept kicking my leg. She was always trying to get me in trouble. If I yelled at her, people would blame me for accusing her, the perfect angel. How could they not see? My father, he was on the phone as usual, talking to someone halfway across the country. Mom smiled at me when I looked up in pain, she always smiled, it was almost as though she couldn’t think of anything else to do. I suddenly wanted to be alone, I felt that way a lot. My sister did something cute and my mother doted; I slipped away. Sitting outside, I began crying. Why didn’t anyone care about me? The holidays only brought me pain, why did they have to come every year? Maybe… I would go for a walk.
She sat where my sister had so many years ago. They were about the same age, maybe? No, my family moved far away after I went missing, they didn’t even search for me. New tears burned from old pains. This time she noticed.
“Are you okay?”
“I…” talking proved harder then it should have, I’d learned to live with my past many years ago, so why suffer so bad now? “This is the last place I saw my family.”
“Oh, did they die?”
Somehow her words made me laugh. A look of confused horror flashed in her still pained eyes, giving her a mildly insane look. “No, they left me.”
“That’s horrible, why would they leave?”
“Because I was a horrible child, and they didn’t want me…”
“That can’t be true.”
“No matter how many people say that, it just doesn’t make it true. I wandered away and they didn’t even look for me.”
“I’m so sorry…”
I could see her mood rapidly growing worse and immediately felt bad unloading as I did. “Please don’t worry about it, that was many years ago, I’ve… moved on.”
“How old were you?”
“I’d recently turned seven, we were actually out celebrating that day… but enough about me, much too depressing, don’t you think?”
“I’m afraid my story isn’t much better.”
“A day for darkness…”
“My father used to say that.”
When she was four, her parent’s divorced and she was forced to move to Canada with her mother. The woman never smiled, she had the worst temperament allowable by law. Sara grew up a tomboy, pretending most of the time to be a guy, only the principal of her school knew the truth. He allowed the deception because it amused him to do so, and she lived in constant fear of being sold out.
She never knew about life before her mother, and never met her father. She found she could not respect her mother, and brought as much trouble home as she could. It was about the time that the cops decided to keep her in lock-up over night and drop her off at school, that she realized this wasn’t working, so she just ran away. She was a fifteen year old girl wandering alone in the world and she made do, babysitting or dog walking. She didn’t have a good life, but she had a life of her own, and that was enough. Eventually she made a small life for herself, tried many times to date, but everyone was intimidated. She had recently lost the closest thing to a serious relationship she’d ever had.
She was driving home from having her heart ripped out and stomped on when her car exploded, breaking the final thread of sanity she had left. And that’s where we met.
Another long silence ensued as we contemplated one another. Whose life was worse? Was there even really a difference? I reached out and took her hand, and felt a spark. I could feel my resentment fade and the depression dissipate. We’d both been through so much, it just wasn’t fair.
“I forgive you.”
“I never even blamed you.”
We embraced as the staff and patrons around us continued milling about with their own lives, completely unaware of the lives destroyed here so long ago. We held each other so tightly and so long, I never thought we’d separate. I never wanted to. The orbs on the tree sparkled brightly as a car pulled up, and when the light faded, so did we.
