Purest Fiction: Off Ramp

The fog resolved to steady drizzle, and she didn’t know which was worse. The woman pressed close to the guardrail. Her shoes slid in the bluestone chips and crumbling asphalt on the margin of the road. There was the familiar hiss of tires on wet pavement, and she fought the panicky desire to freeze.

Comparative safety was yards ahead.

With a mighty roar, the dirty semi moved past at the speed limit. Its draft made her stagger and the water thrown up by its wheels spattered her glasses. If she survived walking farther up the road, she could lean on the “road closed” barrier that blocked the off-ramp and put the suitcase down for a moment.
“Either someone has a sense of humor, or life imitates fiction,” she said to a robin that perched on the fence pole and shook water from its wings. “I’m as homeless now as Ruarri ever was. I chose this red suitcase in a moment of hope, and look at me.”
The bird turned its head away and preened. More traffic approached, and she looked over her shoulder. Where were the state troopers when you wanted them?
Behind the barrier, she put down her burden and sat on it.

The people who knew her wouldn’t believe how much exercise she’d had in the last month, but she wouldn’t inform them. Better to protect those who still wanted to know her and evade the others.

“Penn-syl-van-i-a,” she drew out the word as she swatted a mosquito. “Penn’s woods. There’s plenty of lumber on these slopes to build a house, if I could do what I learned from the carpenter on ‘American Woodshop’.”
The anonymous years she spent watching public television seemed dreamlike now. She needed a small town refuge, the kind of place that might have an efficiency apartment above a restaurant.

Purest Fiction is a short story with twelve installments. Stay tuned for Purest Fiction: Post Office.
Read more of my published short stories here.

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