Friday February 19th, 2010

The exercise:

Your four lines of prose this Friday shall be about: the rest stop.

Also (if you drop the 'the') a great song by Matchbox Twenty.

Mine:

Eyes struggling to stay open, shoulder muscles burning, nerves pinching together in my butt like the cheeks of a child in the presence of an overly affectionate aunt... it was definitely time to pull the truck over and have a rest.

And then, as if a highway god had been monitoring my thoughts, the headlights of my old Ford found the sign: Rest Stop 500m. I breathed a long, noisy sigh of relief and pulled off where the sign indicated as I eased off the gas, my foot taking its sweet time to transfer over to the brakes.

As the front of the truck smashed through the rotting wood railing mere inches from the edge of the highway and I hurtled towards the mass of jagged rocks two hundred feet below, I remembered much too late that this stretch of road belongs to Loki.

2 comments:

Greg said...

Haha! Stretches of road belonging to Loki can't be good for the drivers! That's almost a bedtime fairy tale, and it's got the right quality of writing to it too.
I haven't heard of Matchbox twenty in a while, and curiously enough that jogged my memory about this: mashup of Annie Lennox by DJ Earworm. Definitely worth a listen.

The rest stop

"What does this one do?" I asked, pointing to a large organ stop almost out of reach. Father McKenzie glanced at it and said dismissively, "That's the rest stop."
I pulled it before he could tell me not to, and the reservoir of air for the organ discharged through all the pipes at once causing a cacophany to resonate through the church.
Father McKenzie raised his hand to hit me just as two lady parishioners collapsed in shock in front of the altar, and I realised I might have overstepped the line this time.

Marc said...

Glad you liked it :)

Listening to your link now... it's quite trippy. In a good way.

Haha, ah the dangers of touching things one's not supposed to :)