Category Archives: Fiction & Essays

Author Commentary: Rest Stop

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http://www.freeflashfiction.com/index.php/stories/action-and-adventure/rest-stop-lori-schafer/
     
“Rest Stop” is essentially a true story of something that happened to me when I was seventeen. I’d run away from my home in Massachusetts two weeks earlier, just a week after graduation. After making made my way down the East Coast and across the South in the car I’d bought in secret with money I’d earned waitressing, I found myself hungry and baking in the scorching heat of July in rural Texas. I was supposed to start school at U.C. Berkeley two months later, but since I was still underage and therefore subject to recall if caught, I was understandably anxious about conserving the little money I had, as I wasn’t sure how easy it would be for a kid with no parents, no home, and no local references to find a job. Being mathematically minded, I quite naturally spent the long miles driving in calculating a fairly precise budget, which, once I’d paid for necessities like gas and oil, had little room in it for luxuries like food. And then I stopped at this gas station and here was this wonderful man asking me earnestly if I had enough money to get where I was going or whether I wanted to earn a little extra to tide me over until I arrived safely at my intended destination.

I’m embarrassed to admit now that I was just as naïve as the girl in the story. I spent a lot of time travelling alone in the years that followed, and was propositioned numerous times by male strangers seeking the company of a young woman for an afternoon or an hour. But this was the first time it had happened, and I was so utterly confounded by his perplexing behavior that I spent many miles pondering it in my head. Why had this man been so inexplicably kind? Who offers money to a girl he doesn’t even know, in exchange for services he isn’t sure she’s qualified to perform? I’d probably driven a good half hour before comprehension finally came roaring into my addled teenaged brain and I understood that I’d come unbelievably close to becoming an unwitting body for hire. At length amusement over the incident replaced my horror, and at least the next time it happened, I was prepared with a polite, “No, thank you, sir.”

My favorite part of this piece is the description of the insects on the windshield. Although Texas insect splatter can’t compare to that of, say, North Dakota, which is the absolute worst I have ever seen, it’s definitely one of the more brutal varieties. Cleaning your windshield to get the dust off of it is one thing; when you have to scrape off the dead bugs every hundred miles just so you can see the road, that’s another ballgame entirely. Also, since this is basically a true story, I should note in the interest of honesty that I do not have and never have had skinny thighs. Skinny, as a word in the phrase, simply sounded better to me than thick ;)

Novel Excerpt: My Life with Michael

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I couldn’t tell you how many times I checked the clock. I’m sure you know how it went, anyway. You look at the clock and it’s only two minutes later than it was the last time you looked. Next time you check it’s only been three more minutes. The next time you hold out as long as you possibly can until you’re sure it’s been at least twenty minutes, and then you look and it’s still only been five. And then finally you start thinking about something else and you don’t look at the time and suddenly it’s been an hour and if you don’t hurry up, you’re going to be late. So rather sooner than I expected, it was after four and I still had to find the hotel, so I decided I’d better get going. I hastened back to the car, and it was almost a relief to be rushing around because if I instead had to think about what was going to happen in less than an hour from now, I was worried that my brain might implode and I would have come all this way for nothing.

I must have made half-a-dozen wrong turns on my way to the hotel. I’d always had a lousy sense of direction, but this was unusually bad, even for me. I was downtown, and each misstep resulted in an eternity of turning around or circling the block and waiting for traffic lights and pedestrians. By the last time, I was half-convinced I was trying to get lost on purpose. But then I realized that if that happened, I’d have to call and tell him, and having that particular phone conversation sounded even more unendurable than seeing him in person. And when I crept around the next corner, fingers clenched to the steering wheel as if it were a life preserver, the street sign told me it was the right one and there I was, driving into the hotel parking lot at last. I still had twenty minutes to spare. Why wasn’t it over yet?!

I sat absolutely still for five of those minutes, mentally commanding my heart to cease its infernal yammering. I spent the next five gathering up my things and checking to make sure that all of the windows and doors were locked and the parking brake was set six or seven times. And then it was ten till and I still had to get to the tenth floor and I figured I’d better hurry because I didn’t want to be late. What was this, a job interview? Contempt for my own foolishness finally got me going. I made it through the lobby and all the way up the stairs to the tenth floor without hesitating, and then I was in his hallway and the room was right there, but I was panting and sweating and I couldn’t go in just yet. Unless it was the thirty-eighth floor or I had a lot of baggage or companions, I always took the stairs, and now I regretted that age-old resolve on my part because I was a mess and even worse, I’d lost my physical momentum and had started thinking again about what was going to happen here. Big mistake.

The hallway was high-ceilinged and dim. Phony candle-type lanterns hung in iron brackets every ten feet along the walls, spilling what little there was of their eerie light onto the blood-red carpet. The only windows to the outside were at the very ends of the protracted hallways; I could barely make out the tiny breaks they carved into the pervasive gloom. I wondered briefly if they were large enough for me to jump through. Hoping for respite from the strangling sensation that clutched at my throat, I craned my neck skyward. The ceiling was decorated with some sort of bronze gilded pattern, and where a moment before it had given the impression of loftiness, now it seemed to be pressing down, ever closer to my unprotected skull, and the gilding wasn’t an artistic design, it was a web of interlocking chains poised to drop down and trap me there, where Michael would undoubtedly find me the next morning, huddled in a whimpering ball and ready for the insane asylum. I peeked reluctantly back towards his door. It stood tall and ominous, a large black iron knocker dead in its center. “Boom! Boom! Boom!” I seemed to hear it clamor, surely in order to summon the damned spirits within. “Boom! Boom! Boom!” And then there was a slow creaking sound, like that of a poorly-oiled door or the gates of hell opening, and I leapt into the air and from that elevated vantage point finally saw that there was a visitor entering another room down at the other end of the hall.

I exhaled. Somewhere in my head I heard chicken noises and that was annoying so I ran a brush through my now mostly-dry hair, resettled my bag on my shoulder, and took a fortifying deep breath. I took the teeniest hold possible of that big black knocker and gave it the most timid tap I could muster. “Boom!” it resounded. I heard movement inside the room, and then a chasm was opening before my eyes, threatening to swallow me up, and I held my breath as the door separated slowly from its jamb. I don’t mind telling you that in that moment I was scared out of my wits and not in the least bit horny. And when he finally appeared in the doorway the expression on his face told me that he felt about the same way.

“Hi,” I said, showing off my quick wit and brilliant conversational skills.

“Hi,” he answered back, with equally impressive eloquence.

And then we stared at each other, motionless with fear.

“Can I come in?” I asked finally, speculating with some justification that the answer might be no.

“Oh, of course.” He moved aside about three inches, and I wiggled my way out of the hallway and into the room.

Twilight

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Twilight was always the best time of the day. In summer it fell late; hung suspended a full hour after dinner was over, waited patiently for the neighborhood to venture outside to enjoy it. And when the dishes were cleaned up and put away, while the fathers were leisurely perusing their evening papers and peacefully puffing on their cigars, the mothers would escape from housework for a time and come out to relax on their peeling painted front porches in the darkening light, relishing the cool breeze which would waft away the sweat of kitchen life. They would sit, two or three or maybe four of them at a time, and talk abstractedly together and watch their children play, allowing them even to stay out past dark, because their mothers were sitting right there watching them, making sure they were safe.

It was only on nights like these that she got to see the streetlights turning on, waking one by one for their night’s work. She loved that. How simple a thing each day to create, after a nearly-imperceptible sunset occurring beyond the hills around the town, this half an hour of silent electrical beauty. The lamps nestled amongst the trees would brighten first, scattering the evening that grew dimmest fastest in their natural shadows. And as dusk settled in, as if lit in roundabout succession by a dazed firefly which drifted distractedly from the trees to the sidewalk to the road, each in turn blinked tranquilly, almost naturally, into an evening of life.

Their street was lined with trees of all kinds, though she couldn’t identify any of them but the maples, which littered the gutters and sidewalks with helicopter seeds in the spring. But the unnamed foliage which merely shaded the street during the day enchanted it at night. There was one particularly magical section of road just a block up from her house, where one of the electrical light-poles was isolated from the others. In summer, when the coat of leaves arraying the occupants of the tree-belt was thick and full, it stood like a lonely sentinel earnest in its duty, casting its beam in the center of a vast shadow the other streetlights could not or would not penetrate, describing a near-perfect circle of yellowish brightness on the asphalt.

She would strap on her tag-sale roller-skates and head for that spot, telling her mother only that she wouldn’t go far, knowing that she would be hidden from view by the hedge lining the neighbor’s yard and that idiosyncratic bend in the road. She was a good child, and worthy of trust. But if her behavior was open, her thoughts were kept secret. Private dreams and imaginings were her own.

With a thrill of apprehension, she would approach that spotlit stage, pausing with trepidation in the shadows at its edge before daring to expose herself to the circle of light. Then, abruptly, it would happen; she would be drawn irresistibly into it. Skating shyly at first, in simple ovals, and, when she had gathered her nerve, daring to progress to figure eights. Wise she felt, tracing infinity with the motions of her body, wise enough even to pretend that her surface was smooth, her steps inaudible, her very presence undetectable. And when at last she had forgotten the fathers, and the mothers, and the neighbors, and was aware only of the dark, and the light, and the street, then it would come, the highlight of her performance: right leg extended in a slow perpendicular, erect in what she imagined was a perfect arabesque, maintained until her momentum bore her resolutely into the shadows. It was the only move she knew, but it was the only one she needed. For she was strong, she was beautiful, she was graceful. Even if it was only in twilight that it showed.

Then her mother’s familiar shrill tongue-whistle would sound, and she would hurry back home, the scarred rubber wheels rolling roughly and noisily across the worn asphalt, the memory of her performance still replaying itself before her eyes. She would sleep well that night.

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“Twilight” is one of the pieces featured in my autobiographical short story and essay collection Stories from My Memory-Shelf: Fiction and Essays from My Past (only $0.99 Kindle, $5.99 paperback). To learn more about it, please visit the book’s webpage or subscribe to my newsletter.

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