The story continues...
Despite the aches and worries, the cold and hunger, sleep beckons the vixen. She knows that would be dangerous and yet the oblivion is like a siren’s song. Even the risks have a temptation… she shakes her head. C’mon silly fox, big girls soldier on. Standing up she rubs some feeling into her paws and strides on, avoiding the treacherous gravel edges. It must have been another two hours she guesses before she first heard the noise behind her a car? Moving out of the middle of the road she wrings out her hair, wipes down her muddy paws and then scowls at her blouse. It was ruined already, but now it was ruined with fresh mud streaks. The vehicle is drawing nearer now, a distant rumble in the centre of a misty halo of light, showcasing how many tiny droplets are in freefall. Shaking her hair free it falls about her shoulders, wrung out but still quite damp, the vixen puts on her best smile and sticks out the hitching thumb: the universal symbol of hope. It’s a truck! The fox loved trucks, the smell the sound the names. The drivers… Please have space, please have coffee and please have good music, please, please, please!
The headlight themselves where visible now and the running lights too, she fancied she could see the driver, tall, rugged, handsome. She knew she couldn’t really though and at this stage she’d accept short, bookish and ugly. In fact she’d be happy with barely any space, no heater, no coffee and Slim Whitman B-side on repeat please just stop. The driver dipped his lights, he must have seen her, and she could hear him slowing down with his gears. Or could she? He’s going too fast… The air-horn sounded: loud, abrupt, alien. Not the sound of her childhood, when she would pump her paw in the air to mime sounding the horn to truckies, Truxsie some of the regulars called her at the Gravy Depot truckstop. This sound was rejection, it said ‘get out of the way’, ‘get back in the gutter stupid fox’. Her thumb had said ‘yes please’ but the horn replied ‘no thanks’. The massive long-nosed eighteen-wheeler hurtled past. A log truck, a Kenworth she thought distantly, dust and debris whipped around her like a hurricane and then she fell over in the vacuum of its passing. Its tail-lights red and sinister. Mere minutes passed and she was alone in the dark again. Damp, cold on the ground and so, so tired. Caught between wanting to lie down and needing to stand up she was frozen in indecision. I’m not at the bottom, I’m not at the top coz this is the stair where I always stop. She laughs then, the song had always seemed so sad and yet at this moment it was the most joyous thing she could imagine, it gives her the strength to stand again. So she stands.
Topic: Trixsie's odds and ends (Read 91845 times)