Written Off

by Georg

Time Heals Most Wounds - The Prison Of Our Minds

The Prison Of Our Minds (original, 950 words)

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The driving rain is cold and washes through my thin coat in the darkness of the highway shoulder. The trucks passing by are the worst, throwing out a blast of water that can knock you off your feet and into the ditch if you do not keep your eyes open. I trudge onwards, trying to keep my leaden feet far enough from the highway to be safe, as if safety is something I can ever desire. There is a ritual to putting your thumb out when you hear the hiss of the oncoming car, but staying back far enough that the occasional asshole does not try to come as close to you as possible without denting their expensive vehicle. So far in the last few years, I’ve never been hit, but in the darkness and the heavy rain, there is always the chance. All it would take is somebody who had been drinking a little too much, a moment of inattention, the screech of tires on wet pavement, and—

The bright red lights of brakes glitter through the darkness as a van splashes past me, slowing to a halt with its emergency lights flashing. Despite the weight of cold water soaked into my clothes, I pick up my speed to a lumbering run and slide into the offered passenger seat with my backpack between my legs.

There is a ritual to this too, where I express my gratitude to the driver in a quiet fashion while he or she attempts to merge back into traffic without killing us all. Then of course comes the question I dread:

“So, where’ya headed?”

There is no simple way to admit that your destination is unknown even to yourself, so I lie, but even then, the lie is so practiced that it flows out the same as a truth would. How do you tell someone you are not going to anywhere, but away from everything? I have been going to a relative’s funeral, or out on a job search, or visiting an old college friend so many times, always far away from where I am now and always carefully in the direction I was headed at the time. The weather is an easy topic to cover now, as the time spent under the freezing rain has given me so many creative words for ‘wet’ that I actually relax for a change, looking into the headlight-lit night through the kaleidoscopic distortion of the rain with only a few unwelcome ghosts troubling my thoughts. Still, I shiver, and the driver helpfully turns up the heat and directs it in my direction, regardless of the vaguely dog-like scent I emit while drying.

We travel in relative silence for a while with some late-night talk show host on the radio telling about the proper way to manage money while the commercials push the value of buying gold. Neither of us seem to be the target of their sales, but we listen anyway with the occasional comment at the complete idiots who call in and have no problems dumping their troubles on some stranger.

Then comes the second inevitable question for which I should have been prepared:

“So, where are you from?”

I paint the picture of my past with a faint brush, faded with intentional effort. I leave out the children, the wife, the house and dog, all things I have left behind to another person who stepped into my shoes without even waiting for them to cool. Sometimes on rare occasions the driver will offer a job, or perhaps a place to stay for a few days, but mostly they will use my words to talk about their own life, as this driver does. His turnoff is coming up, and his words blur together. Proud words about his own family and their recent brush with a drunken driver who ran a stop sign and totalled their car. By a stroke of good fortune, they were uninjured, and as he praises a cold and distant God about his luck, I remain silent to him, keeping my face stoic and my breathing regular. He offers to drive me to the next highway turnoff, but I decline in as few words as I can, stumbling out of his van and mindlessly taking the money he presses into my hand as the rain once again begins to soak my coat. It is as much as I am able to thank him despite the bitter taste of ashes in my mouth, and to put on at least an attempt at a smile as we exchange waves.

Then he is gone, and I am once again alone on the side of the highway with my backpack. The rain pours down just as hard as before, forming little rivers under my bag as I rest my weary body by the side of the road and let the tears flow, just this once. I can still see the mangled car, taste the dust of the airbag on my lips, feel the rain from that horrid night soaking into my suit, hear the anguished cries of the child in the back seat of the twisted wreckage as I threw up into the ditch.

No matter how far I travel, the memories follow. Twelve men and women denied my fault and set me free, but I carry the prison I have constructed with me, like some tortoise by the road who can never set himself free of his own shell.

Then another vehicle brakes in the rain, a truck this time, and I hustle to it. Maybe this time I can be carried away from my past.

Maybe I can live again.

Maybe…

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Below is the story as it was entered into the Writeoff.me site, edited down to 747 words

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The driving rain is cold and washes through my thin coat in the darkness of the highway shoulder. I trudge onwards, trying to keep my leaden feet far enough from the highway to be safe, as if safety is something I can ever desire. There is a ritual to putting your thumb out when you hear the hiss of the oncoming car, but staying back far enough to be safe. In the last few years, I’ve never been hit, but in this darkness and rain, there is always the chance. All it would take is somebody who had been drinking, a moment of inattention, the screech of tires on pavement, and—

The bright red lights of brakes glitter through the darkness as a van splashes past me, slowing to a halt. Despite the weight of water soaked into my clothes, I pick up my speed to a lumbering run and slide into the offered passenger seat with my backpack between my legs.

There is a ritual to this too, where I express my gratitude to the driver in a quiet fashion while he or she attempts to merge back into traffic without killing us all. Then of course comes the question:

So, where’ya headed?

There is no simple way to admit it, so I lie like always. How do you tell someone you are not going to anywhere, but away from everything? I have been going to so many places so many times, always far away from where I am now. As the conversation moves on, the weather is an easy topic, as the time spent under the freezing rain has given me so many creative words for ‘wet’ that I actually relax, looking into the headlight-lit night through the kaleidoscopic distortion of the rain with only a few unwelcome ghosts troubling my thoughts. Still, I shiver, and the driver helpfully turns up the heat in my direction, regardless of the vaguely dog-like scent I emit while drying.

Then comes the second inevitable question:

So, where are you from?

I paint the picture of my past with a faint brush, faded with intentional effort. I leave out the children, the wife, the house and dog, all things I have left behind to another person who stepped into my shoes without even waiting for them to cool. Sometimes on rare occasions the driver will offer a job, or perhaps a place to stay for a few days, but mostly they will use my words to talk about their own life, as this driver does. His turnoff is coming up, and his words blur together. Proud words about his own family and their recent brush with a drunken driver who ran a stop sign and totalled their car. By a stroke of good fortune, they were uninjured, and as he praises a cold and unfeeling God about his luck, I remain silent to him, keeping my face stoic and my breathing regular. He offers to drive me to the next highway turnoff, but I decline in as few words as I can, stumbling out of his van and mindlessly taking the money he presses into my hand as the rain once again begins to soak my coat. It is as much as I am able to thank him despite the bitter taste of ashes in my mouth, and to put on at least an attempt at a smile as we exchange waves.

Then he is gone, and I am once again alone on the side of the highway. The rain pours down just as hard as before, forming little rivers under my bag as I rest my weary body by the side of the road and let the tears flow. I can still see the mangled car, taste the dust of the airbag on my lips, feel the rain from that horrid night soaking into my suit, hear the anguished wail of the child in the back seat of the twisted wreckage as I threw up into the ditch.

No matter how far I travel, the memories follow. Twelve men and women denied my fault and set me free, but I carry the prison I have constructed with me, like some tortoise by the road who can never set himself free of his own shell.

Then another vehicle brakes in the rain, a truck this time, and I hustle to it. Maybe this time I can be carried away from my past.

Maybe I can live again.

Maybe…

Author's Note:

The Prison Of Our Minds placed 10th out of 60 in the Time Heals Most Wounds minific contest, and flows from the time I picked up a hitchhiker on I-70 just outside of Topeka in a driving rainstorm. No, nothing about the hitchhiker I picked up and the one in the story have anything to do with each other except the pickup and dropoff points, but I have this annoying tendency to pick apart events and generate absurd hypotheticals about them. I’m a quiet house-mouse, and the concept of traveling across the country with nothing more than my thumb in the air would scare me to bits. So I thought about it over the last few years, wondered just who he was and what he was doing, and stored the resulting musings in the big mental closet marked ‘Experiences.’

The original of this story ran 950 words, so I had to trim and prune and sand away rough corners to get it down to 747, or three words under the limit. Generally, I think that was a good thing, because it made me examine every word and throw out anything that did not fit the narrative I wanted to cover, and in particular, *how* I wanted to cover it.

I had a few criticisms I wanted to address that mostly fall along those stylistic lines.

Vagueness: The reason why he no longer had a family was kept vague intentionally, much like adjusting the focus on a movie shot so the main character is in focus and the rest of the scene somewhat fuzzy. It doesn’t matter if they left him, he left them, they drifted apart, she was fooling around, etc… He doesn’t have them any more. He’s not trying to get them back. They only remind him of his mistake, which is one reason he is running away from them too.

Time issues with the family breakup: Note that he stood trial: Twelve men and women denied my fault and set me free. It takes about a year to be dragged through the insufferable hell of a jury trial, being accused of horrible things by the prosecutor, and winding up considerably impoverished even if you win, which he did. Families have broken up for far less, and this one broke up before he even left: all things I have left behind to another person who stepped into my shoes without even waiting for them to cool. Keeping the exact time and circumstances of the breakup vague was also intentional, as the focus should (again) be on the hitch hiker.

Low environment detail, no/little dialogue: Again, keeping the focus on the hitch hiker and his emotions. It doesn’t matter what color the car was, who the driver was, what exactly they said, etc… The only thing that should jump out and stay with the reader is his attempt to flee his past and the cold rain, which is the thread through the whole story.

Turtles as a metaphor: The turtle carries its home as it travels wherever it may. They cannot ‘slip their shell’ as in a cartoon, because part of their spine is actually in the shell. Therefore, turtle. Or tortoise. Besides, the Box Turtle is the Kansas State Reptile.

Protagonist was not very sympathetic: Again, intentional. He is running away from something he sees as his own fault. He’s guilty, at least inside his mind. Trying to portray him as an innocent running away from something he didn’t do would go straight up against that. Note the cues about drinking, driving, his accident, the wailing child in the car he had hit. I did *not* consider having his own family die in the accident (Sorry Letter_J) because A) That’s more cruel than I like to write and B) Seriously? No.

Length: Yes, it could have been longer, and I’ll post the original later in Written Off, my complilation. To be honest, longer was not really that much better and possibly a little worse, but I’ll post it anyway for the curious.

Motive: Really, people. He’s running away from his guilt over the accident he had. He can’t really get away from a mental trauma like that by physical distance, so he’s screwed. He won’t admit to it, because he would have to *face* his fears. It’s as simple as that. Sometimes the monster we fear the most is the one in the mirror.

Comments

[Georg]

Not too bad this time. Tenth. I'm getting better, but so is everybody

[FanOfMostEverything]

Wow. A carefully measured punch to the gut. Nicely delivered.

[howard035]

7270109 But she hasn't lost every fight, surely. If she wins say half the fights at first she will eventually level, then win a lot more than half the fights, then keep winning and leveling until the kids no longer provide sufficient XP for her level. And usually it's the other party that goes to Mrs. Cheerilee, not Diamond.