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ofearthandstars) wrote2022-04-28 04:30 pm
LJ Idol - 3 Strikes - Pursuit
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therealljidol.
Day Six
Gemma slammed the hood of the old Honda down, shaking a cloud of orange dust from the car’s faded bumper. The radiator appeared to be fine, but a rubber hose was starting to crumble from age and had managed to work its way loose from the connecting clamp. She knew that using a box cutter and duct tape was a temporary fix, but it would get them home. She picked up the plastic jug, now empty of water, and walked around the car to toss it in the trunk with a sigh.
Allison stirred in the backseat as the trunk closed, but she didn’t wake. Gemma stared at her for a moment, absorbing the way the sun illuminated the eight-year old’s soft dark curls, and felt a familiar tightness clawing in her chest. She was glad her daughter had succumbed to the nap, as neither of them had slept well the night before, and honestly, it made supply runs a little easier to not have a million questions sling-shotted from the back seat. Gemma felt a pang of guilt, but quickly stuffed it back down.
The wind was beginning to pick up, swirling the barren fields around them into harmless dust devils that spun and died away as quickly as they appeared. Wiping her hands on her jeans, Gemma glanced at the horizon. The Wyoming sky was as clear and blue and wide as all the pamphlets had promised. Humming an old tune to herself, she climbed back into the car and turned the key, eyes on the temperature gauge. She waited until the needle rose to the center, wavering gently. When it didn’t travel any higher, she smiled for a flash of a second. Atta girl, a long-gone voice echoed in her head.
“We’ll be fine,” she grumbled as she began edging the car back onto the road. A flip phone with a cracked screen buzzed quietly on the seat beside her, and she frowned. She’d picked it up only a week ago, prepaid in cash, and hadn’t shared the number with anyone over the eighteen-hundred miles they’d traveled. The call was likely a wrong number – someone’s fat fingering of the more modern digital keypads and touch sensitive screens – or an artifact of someone else’s old life, but she couldn’t be too careful. She ignored the call and blocked the incoming number immediately.
There was no traffic as she eased the vehicle back towards their new homestead. Just the way she preferred it.
~~
Day Eighteen
Alice was standing on an old wooden crate against the kitchen counter, eyeing a recipe card as she pushed her fingers into the bowl of dough and began kneading it the way her mother had shown her. The kitchen wasn’t much of one – there was the speckled black countertop, under which sat a half-sized fridge, and to her right, a single dull metal sink. Behind her was an old electric stove with a cracked metal surface that was starting to rust. Its two dead back burners stored pans in between washes.
Her mother was pacing the hallway again, a hallway that she figured had probably seen its share of pacing based on the way the dark wood was worn to a lighter shade at the center. Her mother had already checked each door and window, ensuring the locks were secure, and tugging the makeshift curtains tightly together. She was singing softly to herself while scratching away at a palm-sized notepad that Alice knew contained a tab of available and needed supplies.
Snippets of her mother’s soft alto voice slipped through the small space, carrying a song that had been popular before Alice was born. She knew better than to ask about it. She pounded the biscuit dough with her small fists, enjoying the release it gave her.
~~
Day Twenty-Six
Gemma was starting to relax, if only a tiny bit. The crude privacy fence was finished, and she allowed Allison to open the curtains to the front living room, as neither of them spent any time in the room anyway. Once intended as a formal entertainment space, the room was devoid of furniture, except a small side table that Gemma pushed up to the window and adorned with a vase of artificial daisies to help the place look legitimate. The Honda was parked around the back, and she’d staked “NO TRESPASSING”, “NO SOLICITATION”, and “BEWARE OF DOG” signs along the front of the driveway, which was not really a driveway so much as two lanes of dirt worn into the overgrown lawn by the tires of the previous resident. Gemma smiled, as there was definitely no dog, but maybe there could be someday. She’d also started digging out a small area for a garden, which would mean fresh vegetables and fewer supply runs.
During the day they read books together behind the cover of the curtains. Gemma had procured several fourth-grade workbooks on a supply run – mostly math and science related – as well as a blank notebook and pack of wooden pencils, which she gave to Allison to practice writing her new name with.
~~
Days Twenty-Nine through Thirty-Three
In the evenings they worked together on tuning up and maintaining the old car, huddled around its chassis until the Milky Way arced high across the sky. The girl mostly watched or held the light, and searched through the old red toolbox to find the right sized tools as her mother requested them. Her mother was always pointing out the critical parts of the engine and electrical system, explaining their purpose and how they worked. She often let the girl loosen or tighten nuts and pieces, and quizzed her on the various fluids and parts that were necessary to keep the car in good running condition.
Her mother would often run her hands along the dark green exterior of the car and pat it, as if it were a giant, metal cat. “You have to know how to take care of her,” she told the girl. “So she can take care of us.”
Afterwards they would sit on the back steps and snuggle, looking up at the wide open sky and pointing out familiar constellations. Her mother would scan the horizon in between, eyes open for wolves or worse.
~~
Day Thirty-Four
The burner phone buzzed across the speckled black countertop as Alice and her mother sat down to breakfast. Her mother snatched the phone and flipped it open to check the number displayed on its tiny greyscale screen.
“Who is it?” Alice asked, shoveling a plastic spoon into a bowl of cement-thick oatmeal. She searched for a raisin or some sign of sweetness.
“No one we know, Allison,” her mother said, emphasizing the last word. She waited for the call to go silent before shifting through a dedicated series of key motions to block the number.
The girl made a face, and traced the letters into her oatmeal. A-L-L-I-S-O-N.
~~
Day Forty-One
The house sat atop a hill at the back of a couple of acres, its winding driveway pock-marked by scrubby-looking bushes that led down to the road. By the road was a rust-bucket of a mailbox which protruded slightly forward and out at a 60 degree angle, as if the wind had been trying to push it into the road for the past decade. Gemma rarely checked it, as there was nothing of value that should ever come through – even the electricity was still under the name of the previous resident, kept up with regular payments to a drop box. Still, she emptied the box out from time to time, tossing letters addressed to those no longer around into a plastic bag which she tied shut and placed in the garbage, never even bringing it into the house. Today there was a thick catalog stuffed into the box – the type full of inane household goods, such as placards proclaiming “Bless This Mess” or a hair bonnet that attaches to a hair dryer – and addressed to Resident. Gemma started to throw it into the plastic bag with the other mail, but paused, thinking it might provide them with something to laugh over later. If nothing else, it would make good practice for Allison’s reading.
She looked up the driveway, her mind on the garden. She wondered if there were any seed packets that could be ordered anonymously.
Gemma pursed her lips and tucked the catalog under her arm, wondering if she might be getting too comfortable here.
~~
Day Forty-Eight
Allison was dividing fractions in one of the math workbooks. She flipped the denominator over the numerator. “Three divided by three-eighths equals eight,” she said out loud, then wrote her name at the top of the finished page. Gemma smiled beside her, scouring through an old Haynes manual and making notes.
The phone buzzed along the kitchen countertop, but they both ignored it.
~~
Day Fifty
Allison woke up to the sound of sobbing. As the haze of sleep cleared, she climbed over the side of the bed and walked across the hall to the second bedroom. The girl gently placed a hand on her mother’s shoulder. The woman quieted, pulling the girl into the bed beside her and wrapping her body around her daughter tightly, until the girl could hardly breathe.
~~
Day Sixty-one
Evening was falling, and there was no traffic along the road, so Gemma and Allison had decided to walk together to the mailbox. The sun was falling behind the hill to their backs as they walked, casting the world in front of them in grey-blue shade, while the sky continued to dazzle with pink and orange light. Gemma watched as the girl stopped along the path, finding delight in the scattering of small flowering weeds as the day faded away. It had the potential to be a perfect evening, and Gemma hoped that they might have time to read a story together after all the chores were done.
On reaching the mailbox, Gemma opened the latch and pulled out the pile of mail from the inside. Most of it was addressed to the prior residents, except for a thin yellow envelope with a shiny plastic window. Gemma tilted the envelope to better read its addressee, and then dropped it, quickly backing away.
“Oh no,” Gemma said, her eyes growing wide. “No no no no no no.”
Allison looked at her mother with concern, not sure what to do. She reached for the yellow envelope, even as the older woman continued her litany of negatives, falling back into the grass in the dark shadows of the hillside.
The child picked up the thin envelope and frowned. It was addressed to her mother’s old name, a name that she had been warned to no longer use. Allison understood enough now to know that wasn’t right. Sliding her fingers underneath the edges of the flap, she gently lifted the cheap paper from within.
Allison wasn’t sure at first what the letter meant, but her thoughts went immediately to the car fenced at the back of the hill.
Gemma finally gathered herself. She took the young girl’s hand and sighed. “I’m afraid it’s time to leave again, baby girl.”
The girl nodded. “At least it’s nearly dark,” she said.
They sprinted for the house to gather their things, leaving the paper in the drive. The printed header was bold and unmistakable, even in the dimness of dusk:
FINAL WARNING! We have been trying to reach you concerning your car’s extended warranty.
As the small green Honda roared down the drive, the Wyoming winds picked up the letter, tossing it unceremoniously towards the open sky.
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- Erulisse (one L)
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Very well told. I was picturing this being a dystopian future, but I could also see this happening in modern times, so I like that I can speculate on that.
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The post-apocalyptic vibe could have been just the hardship of these two characters and the way life kind of breaks down when you put too much pressure on it, so that was also an interesting dynamic that bolstered the tension.
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I can't imagine having to live life on the run all the time. Not that I'm not busy, but knowing you could have to move at any time sounds so stressful.
The mail message definitely added a surprise note of humor at the end. Great job!
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My first take on the prompt was thinking of the time I lived in the women's shelter. I didn't really want to go dark and revisit that, but I thought about some of the things I had to do during that period to stay hidden, and how we lived on so little afterwards. It's definitely not fun, especially over the long-term.
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