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Prolific Writer
Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Iowa, USA
Gender: Male
Posts: 357
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My first short story
This is a story I wrote called "Three Cars on a Highway." It is about 2300 words, so a little longer than most I guess. I have been working on it for a while, trying to get it just right. If you have the time, please read and respond. I would greatly appreciate it.
"Three Cars on a Highway"
It was a white Toyota and it hadn’t been new for twenty years. It was a small car caked in rust and missing a hubcap. As far as the man knew the air conditioner on the automobile had never worked, likewise with the left turn signal. It attracted its fair share of sarcastic jokes and was the laughingstock of the company parking lot.
With that said, Andrew Crawford just wouldn’t get rid of it. He drove it to work with a sense of pride. Each day he pulled into the parking lot of the appliance factory where he had worked for at least as long as he’d owned his car. Andrew was forty-one years old and had held the job since he was eighteen. When he first applied for the position on the assembly line, he knew that it was a dead end job, but he didn’t expect to be there forever. He would just earn some money to pay for college and once he had his degree, the sky’s the limit. Or so they’d told him.
Once he had graduated college he had given his boss the standard two-week notice before he quit his job. Andrew immediately began searching for a new career, something with good pay, nice benefits, and perhaps a company car. He didn’t expect to drive his little Toyota forever either.
Andrew went to dozens of job interviews, but they turned up nothing. One day before his two-week notice would expire and Andrew would finally be able to leave the assembly line, he went to his boss and told him he didn’t wish to leave the plant. The boss, a man younger than Andrew, allowed him to stay, not wanting to have to put him out on the street. His boss was well aware of the shabby apartment where Andrew lived and knew that without the job he wouldn’t be able to pay the rent for even that.
Years later, Crawford still worked on the assembly line. This day was just like any other. At about ten minutes before 7 AM, he pulled into the plant’s parking lot in his old car and found a space not too far from the plant. He walked over to the building, waving to the security guard on the way in. He signed in and immediately went to work.
He noticed that there was someone new working today. He was a young man, probably no more than nineteen or twenty years old, Andrew figured. He had light brown hair and green eyes and looked timid, probably nervous about the large new building and all of the people in it.
Five hours later, when the break for lunch came, Andrew headed down to the building’s cafeteria. He stood in line, took a tray, and piled some of the starchy noodles onto his plate, smiling and thanking the cooks, as he did everyday. When he had his food and looked around the cafeteria and spotted the new kid sitting at a table across the room. Andrew sat down next to him.
“I’m sorry. Am I in your spot?” the kid asked.
“No, not at all,” Crawford replied. “You’re new, right?” The kid nodded. “What’s your name?”
“Jeremy Olson.”
“You live around here?” asked Crawford, trying to make conversation with the kid about half his age.
“Yeah. My entire life,” Jeremy said.
“Oh? Is that so? Perhaps I know your father. He would be about my age, right?”
The kid’s face got gloomy all of a sudden. He didn’t answer for a few moments and finally said, “No. He died a long time ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” Crawford thought for a moment. “If you don’t mind, may I ask how he died?”
“It was a car accident. It was the day I was born. My mom had just gone into labor and he was on his way to the hospital,” Olson said quietly.
“That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”
Two decades earlier a young man raced down the highway eastbound. It was nearing midnight. The speedometer on the black sports car had surpassed ninety miles per hour several minutes ago, as a blanket of fog had engulfed the area.
The young man was in a blinding rage and with the mood, was not fit to be driving, especially at such speed. His face was red. His hands gripped the steering wheel so tight his knuckles had long since turned white and the tendons in his hands were ready to rupture.
On the loan highway, the sports car’s headlights illuminated the dark, empty road. A two-lane highway, speed limit fifty-five, with plowed corn fields on both sides. Every three or four miles he would pass a house or farm, but that was the only other presence in the area.
This had, of course, all been previously planned out. The now raging young man and his friend had sat down and discussed each aspect of what would happen that night. They had picked this road and this hour of the morning for a reason. The road was never used. It was hardly ever serviced, the cracks and potholes a testament to that. When the new interstate had been constructed two years before, people switched to using the new road. That left his small two-lane highway empty. To make sure no one else was on the road when they would be, they picked an unusual hour of the day.
Everything that happened that night was centered around the girl. She had made fools of both of the young men right in front of their parents and in front of their community. She had made them look like creeps, like idiots. She had done terrible things to these two boys. Now neither of them had a reason to live, in their minds anyway. Tonight they would take her down with them.
Miles away, someone else had just arrived at home. He unlocked the front door and stepped inside. He flipped on the lights and went over to the phone. The light on the answering machine was flashing. He pressed the button to play the message.
“Hello, Mike. This is Doctor Jefferson and I just wanted to let you know that she’s doing just fine right now. Everything looks okay right now. I just wanted to give you a little update.” The message concluded and Mike was relieved. The call had been from his wife’s doctor. She was pregnant and had been admitted to the hospital.
It was rare that women were admitted to the hospital so long before they gave birth, but Mike’s wife was a special case. She had gone into labor a little more than a year before, but had not made it to the hospital in time. The baby did not survive. The fact that it had not been delivered at the hospital and the burden of a hereditary illness at birth were the causes of its death. The doctor had said that if Mike’s wife had made it to the hospital in time and the baby had been delivered properly, then it would have made it even with the illness.
When she had gotten pregnant again, Mike and his wife had decided to admit her into the hospital early, so such a tragic event could not occur again.
Mike wanted to be there with her desperately, but the hospital was too far away to commute back and forth between it and his job.
Now that he was home he decided to kick off his shoes and socks, turn on the television, and get a quick bite to eat. He heated up some leftovers in the microwave and sat down to see what to watch. Since Mike worked late shifts at the truck stop, there was rarely anything of interest on when he arrived home. He ended up just turning it off and eating the leftovers in silence. He was getting up to put his plate in the sink when the phone rang. He answered it. “Hello.”
“Hey, Mike, this is Mary, one of your wife’s nurses. You need to get to the hospital right away. She’s going into labor.”
“I’ll be there in a couple minutes. Thanks,” he said hanging up. He threw on his shoes, not wasting time to put his socks back on, and ran outside to his car. He jumped in pulled out of the driveway. He had his route to the hospital already planned out. He would take the highway.
The two of them rode in silence. She wasn’t sure what was happening and he wasn’t going to tell her. They were on a gravel road, kicking up dust in the middle of the night.
She was quite scared at the moment. She could see the anger in his eyes. It was blatant. He was trying to hide it, but he wasn’t any good at hiding things from her. They had broken up weeks ago after he had realized that she was cheating on him was his best friend. Neither of the boys had known about the other. When they had learned, needless to say they were furious. What made them even more angry was the idea that nearly everyone else knew about it. Their families and the vast majority of the community were all well aware of it.
They were the laughingstocks of the town.
Both of the boys were outraged. If everyone they knew had lied to them like this, then what was the point of living anymore? Everyone hated them. No one cared. Right then the young men had decided to do something about it. They would get their revenge and get what they wanted. The difference was, this time, it was she who was in the dark.
They had gotten her into his car. He had said that “they needed to talk about things” though neither of them had said a word yet.
He turned the car left off of the gravel road onto the highway. He didn’t bother to signal, the left turning signal didn’t work anyway. He headed westbound and began to accelerate.
On that very same highway, the plan was coming together. The black sports car was now going about 110 miles per hour. Soon enough the raging man would meet his friend. If all went as planned, both of their cars would be going around a hundred miles an hour. They would collide in the middle of the highway. It would appear to be an accident and a strange coincidence that each of the victims knew the other, but nothing more than that. There would be three funerals and at each of them people would speak of the tragedy in such an accident.
Both young men knew better. They knew it wouldn’t be an accident. It was a double suicide and a single homicide designed to fool those that had laughed at them and get revenge at the one that had started it all.
The boy could see his friend’s car now. On the other side of the road going at double the speed limit. The black sports car slowly began to pull into the wrong lane, ready to collide head on with the other automobile. The fog had not lifted, making visibility somewhat difficult, but the young man had no doubts.
Then it happened. The two cars slammed into each other. The force of the impact immediately totaled both of them. There was no brilliant explosion. Neither of the gas tanks came ablaze. That was for the movies. This was reality. Two heaping piles of metal lie in the middle of the road, smoke poured out of both engines.
Two people had died instantly.
Careening down the highway was the car containing the young man and the girl. He was searching for his friend’s car, reading to slam into it head on. He should’ve seen it by now. This was taking too long, thought the boy. The girl just sat there clueless as to what was happening that night.
Then he saw it. A smoking pile of what appeared to be scrap metal. He quickly slowed his car to a stop. With the time it had taken him to slow his brand new white Toyota from such a speed, he was only one hundred feet in front of the accident scene. He saw the pieces of his friend’s black car and another vehicle he couldn’t recognize. Not because of the fog, but because he had never seen it before.
By this time he had of course realized the horror of it all. His friend had hit the wrong car. Now a baby boy was being born a few miles away. The baby boy, Jeremy Olsen, would grow up without a father. Only Andrew Crawford would know why it all had happened. The girl sitting next to him in his white Toyota had no idea and Andrew would tell no one.
Crawford would have nightmares every night for the rest of his life. A life he had wanted to end anyway. He would think about the terrible thing that had occurred, how he was now powerless to do anything about it. He could apologize for what happened, but that would require admitting his role in all of it, giving up his innocence.
The girl had called the police to report the accident. Both Andrew and the girl had talked to police and were then allowed to leave the scene. Andrew had driven the girl home. She would never know how close she was to death.
Andrew lived out his life in a pointless oblivion. He kept his job and worked there until his death. He committed suicide when he was forty-one. After having a conversation with the man he had left without a father, he could take it no more. He was found with a self-inflicted gunshot to the head the next day.
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