No real post today, but you can read this short story while I edit Jillian’s Gold.
The Meadow
(c) 2008 Levi Montgomery
She’s mostly quiet, sitting calmly and watching out the window, sometimes watching him drive, with that little smile she has for so much of what he does. Years ago, that smile bugged him a little, till he figured out it meant she was proud of him. He can see the sun stroke across her face as the car turns, even without looking. He can feel the dapples of it across her hands, folded in her lap.
He mostly just drives. It’s gotten to be a bit of a problem these last few years, just enough to make him fierce in his vigilance. He’s never had an accident, but he watches things more closely now. This is the first time he’s had the car out in months, actually.
They used to do this a lot, exploring the roads and lanes around town for as far as they could reach. Saturdays, he only had a half-day at work, and Sundays there was church, but those weekend afternoons were for trying to get lost. They always made it back without without getting lost, without ever even really wondering where they were, but they sure tried.
She’d have packed a lunch, then; chicken and potato salad and pie, books for afterwards, in the big wicker basket her mother made. ’Course, that was the days when you had to be a driver just to be a driver. Not like nowadays, when just anybody can go get a car and get in and drive. No power steering, no power brakes, no automatic trannies and power thisses and automatic thats. You had to know what you were doing, back then.
This car, though, loafs along the freeway at a steady sixty-five, leaving nothing for him to do but steer, watch like a hawk, and mutter at the maniacs pouring past him on his left. Seventy, the signs say, and they’re doing eighty, at least.
