02. Moving Car — A flash fiction story

Welcome to the second week of the Flash Fiction Challenge, where I take the challenge to write a piece of flash fiction in under 60 minutes!
I choose a prompt from the book ‘The Very Short Story Starter’ by John Gillard.
This week’s prompt was: ‘Write a story that starts right at the heart of the denouement, ending the story during the aftermath.’

I remember the rain.

The way it fell on the window — a soft pattering — as though it worried about hurting the earth’s belongings — the hard, concrete objects that built the houses that we lived in, the cars that we drove, the roads we walked.

I always thought humans were nothing compared to these objects — one sudden jerk, a misstep and our body parts could be sliced, cut, smashed, broken or ground to paste by a piece of metal, a misplaced brick, an open door, the corners of a wooden table, a fresh paper. Human bodies were vulnerable compared to the physical entities that surrounded them.

Yet, on the night that it was raining, I never felt more protected than when I was inside that moving metal box — my feet against the windows — translucent with raindrops, my head on my brother’s lap.

We were playing our game. He put his palm around my eyes, shut all the light from my world, and asked, “Where are we?”

I could smell the non-odor that came from the AC — almost to the point that it smelled like a headache. My toes curled in discomfort on the windowpane, and I remember saying,

“Narnia.”

I assumed this is what that closet would smell like — of people and their clothes, with years’ worth of memory collected within its threads, perhaps some evidence of food eaten or the perfume that they wore — of sweat and maybe some tears. It would be a mixture of everything hence it would smell like nothing at all.

I remember my brother laughing. “In real life, stupid.”

I pouted. Yes, I must be stupid to think, to imagine a world that was different from ours. To wish to live there while waking up in this one.

“I don’t know, maybe the airport”, I said.

“No! We have already passed the airport”, My brother said. He removed his hands and pushed my shoulders, forcing me to sit up and added, “My turn.”

He put his head on my lap and closed his eyes himself. He moved his socked feet on the window, and I was sure he couldn’t feel the cold that seeped in from outside.

“Ask me”, he said.

I remember looking ahead as my father drove. My mother murmured something in the passenger seat. The raindrops came, soft still, and I wanted to shout, “What are you so afraid of?”

I thought of all the places we could be in then. Like Hogwarts or the Chocolate Factory or even in one of Nancy Drew’s mysteries. But I was here, surrounded by rain as our car sped across an intersection.

When a glaring pair of headlights passed as bright rays from between my brother’s toes and my mother gasped, “Slow down”, that was when I asked my brother,

“Where are we?”