Weekly Writing – November 4 2023

It was the worst place her car could have stopped. Sputtering one last rum-bitter gasp of spent fuel, a shuddering fume-cough, then rolling to a silent, inertial halt on the gravel shoulder.
Under a moon that was always new on that stretch of the highway. Only starlight watched through the windshield as she tried the key once, twice, not a sound but it clicking in the ignition.
The ditches churned with wind and wildflowers. She had checked the fuel gauge before she’d left.
But old cars and old roads and old moons were all unreliable sometimes. The highway stretched away past the smooth silver plane of her car’s hood, two more straight kilometres, then a shallow dive into the valley and a steeper climb out of sight.
She had already put ten kilometres of that unreliable stretch behind her. Either way, it wasn’t that long a walk. She would be sore by the end, but, if just the distance was a factor, she would survive.
It was everything but the distance that made her clutch uneasily at the wheel. You never heard about anyone getting stuck on that stretch. Anyone walking back to the Super A in the last shallow valley for a cappuccino and a call to the tow company. No, you just heard of people who never showed up wherever they’d been headed.
No abandoned vehicles. No bodies, no signal out there. She had been so careful to check the gauge.
It wasn’t fair that she could find herself like this anyways. But maybe that was what all of them thought.
Maybe they all leaned back to scan their empty backseats for the things they would have packed if they’d really believed something like this could happen. And then they’d done the math, same as her – wondering how fast she could run, for how long, and if it would matter. Wondering how long it might be before another car came along, and if the driver would be brave or stupid enough to stop for her.