Shakespeare's Words version 3.0 launches today
8 years ago
JJC's Year Eight short stories (2)
In complete contrast here is a short story by Eliza Baring:
The gravel crunched and crackled underneath me like fireworks as I pulled out of my drive onto the main road. The cars were slowly crawling towards a barrier at the end of the street, like reluctant prisoners to the gallows. The trees that lined the road were bare and bent like ancient skeletons. Piles of leaves lay around them like pools of orange blood.
I rolled down my window and the icy air slapped my face. The guard held out his hand. I stared at him, confused.
“ID.”
That single word was all he said to me as I fumbled around in the glove box. He snatched it from my hand as if he were afraid of touching me. His hands were thickly gloved and his head was covered with a visored helmet. He seemed more like a robot than a human to me.
Eventually the prison gates lifted. I let my car free-wheel down the little slope that joined the road to the motorway. As I pulled into the queue of cars I saw the expanse of the road. It stretched out infront of me as far as the eye could see. Dead straight, dead flat, like a ruler. Hundreds, thousands, millions of small metal shells glided smoothly over the newly laid tarmac. The white dashed lines either side of me went by as a blur of light.
It was cold outside and my window had steamed up. I rubbed it with my sleeve and a clear patch appeared like a hole in an ice-covered pond. There was a young family in the car next to me. The father looked tense and his knuckles had turned white from clenching the steering wheel too hard. The mother looked anxious and was trying to comfort her bored and hungry children. I looked into the next few cars that passed. They all seemed to be full of young families. At least they had someone to pass the long hours with. I had nothing but the grey plastic inside of my car. It was like a prison cell. A pocket of loneliness and cold, separated from the outside world.
Darkness had come and with it the mist. It was going to be a moonless night with only glaring artificial light to show the way.
I drove past a service station. It looked out of place, lonely. It was the only building for what seemed like hundreds of miles. Inside I could see plastic benches and tired looking people eating out of Styrofoam boxes. A family sat at a table and a spark of recognition flashed through my brain. The family from earlier, the mother had the same anxious manner and the father looked tense. But it couldn’t be. The children were teenage and the parents looked older. I sighed and rubbed my eyes. I was seeing things, I was just tired.
I glanced in my rear-view mirror and caught a glimpse of my reflection. There were huge, dark circles under my eyes and my face looked lined with tiredness. I could have sworn that my hair was thinning. I yawned and stretched my stiff back. I couldn’t feel my feet whose thin leather shoes did nothing to keep out the cold. They felt like lead blocks on the end of my legs. I wished myself into my warm bed at home with a hot steaming cup of tea. But that felt like a world away now and I didn’t know if I was ever going back. That safe and secure world seemed untouchable. Ahead I could see the neon lights of the only service station for miles around.
