newspaper competition

Imagine: a dark, starry night. A woman drove silently down a long dark road, the curves gently rocking her into a state of semi-paranoia. She slowly rolled all the windows down, letting the wind smack against her face. The road she drove down was empty, and again she realized that only Here could she feel comfortable. Dismiss the thought of a busy city sidewalk; it never existed in her perspective.
Streetlights lined the side of the road, washing the scenery in an awkward orange glow and she glanced at them as the car slid through the air, her hand guiding this machine of speed and power.
Have you ever listened to the chirping and buzzing and whirling of bugs as you drove; if you did you would hear a distortion. The sound would rise then drop as you sped past. This sound ended her trance. She was going too fast; she slowed.
She was driving at two in the morning because she thought well when she drove. She didn’t quite know why: freedom, speed, the feeling of leaving something behind or perhaps the knowledge of moving towards something. She had often seen dogs shoving their heads out of a car window, tongue lolling and rippling in the air, a look of ecstasy on their faces. She thought it might be the same feeling.
“I’m not escaping.” She had a low voice, the kind that felt like melted chocolate. It mixed well with the sound of her car engine and the wind got colder making her nose and cheeks tint red.
Suddenly, she wanted to see another car. A feeling of loneliness seeped into her blood like a virus. Her eyes darted to the end of the road, straining against the darkness, fighting a silent war with a night that refused to present that longed for vision of human existence.
She felt like the only person in the world. She felt like this car was a beast that had kidnapped her from a dark isolated tower, taking her to its lair. She felt like she was about to panic. She closed her eyes.
A loud sound made her eyes open like they were attached to springs. It took seconds to realize that it was the sound of a horn, and that a small red sedan was swerving across the road. The blood rushed to her face and her heart dived into her stomach, her hands sweating on the steering wheel. She gasped and jerked her hands to the right, smashing her car into an embankment.
She could hear nothing but a drum pounding in her ear. She painfully released her death grip on the wheel and let her body fall backward against the seat. She was shaking. She felt lost. She heard yelling. She couldn’t stop shaking.
Her door was wrenched open and a tall man was standing there, outlined in that orange light like God, staring down at her. “I’m so sorry…,” even her voice shook. Hands reached in and pulled her out of the beast, and she was transported away to an empty spot by the road, carpeted in brown dead grass. He laid her there. “You are a terrible driver.” She looked up at him without reply and he stared back at her wondering how much it was going to cost to fix the newly made dent in his car. She was still staring at him. He looked at her again and that was the moment that he fell in love.
“I mean it. Fucking terrible driver. What were you doing?” He pulled off his dirty white shirt, smeared with car grease and grim, and tried to gently clean the blood off her forehead. This seemed to inspire some reaction. She blinked and touched the wound, “am I bleeding?”
He replied with a dry look and flopped down next to her, “You were driving in my lane, my car hit your car, your car swerved and hit that embankment, and I think you broke the window with your head.”
“My head?” She touched it tenderly again.
“Don’t touch it.” She lowered her hand.
He looked sideways at her, and pulled out an overly large cell phone, dented and cracked from rough treatment, “I’ll call an ambulance-.“
“Please don’t,” her voice held a tinge of the panic she had felt earlier that night. The man didn’t notice it, or chose not to care, and put the phone back into his pocket. “I’m not running away.”She said it in a way that made him believe it but his only reply was a dumb, “oh.”
The seconds stretched on feeling like an eternity of sitting, one next to the other, in a comfortable silence, washed in darkness. She was coming out of shock. He was thinking about the implications of falling for a person he didn’t know. She was beginning to notice the stranger next to her, ripped jeans, greasy hands, dark hair, dark eyes, inquisitive look aimed at her. He was watching to see her reaction. She stood.
“My name is Phin.” He stood with her, shoving his hands into his pockets.
“Phin. What a strange name. Are you real?”
“What? It’s short for Phinneas.”
“That doesn’t make it less weird. I mean it, are you really real?”
“Really.”
She looked back at her car, then to the car on the other side of the road and put her hand over her eyes. His eyes followed hers, lingering on the red of the car then drifting to the red of her forehead. It was too late to be standing on the side of the road with a woman who was not running away. He thought again about calling an ambulance, then dismissed the thought.
“I think my car still runs. Do you want to go get a cup of coffee and talk this over?
She looked at him and realized that the only thing she could think of to say was, “yes.”