I’ve been knee deep in my notepad today writing story intro after story intro.
Noodling around with words on paper seem to be one of the most cathartic things to do.
The boring part is the mechanical part and that’s just re-typing it for others to read.
So if you wanna pop the trunk of what operates inside of my brain 99% of the day.
Give it a little read and tell me what you think. It’s rough as toast but I’ll massage it into something better.
Mack Garrick spits a wad of chewing tobacco into the dirt and watches it steam in the rain. The woods around him smell like wet ash and diesel. His pickup truck, rusted, one headlight dead, idles on the shoulder, coughing smoke. The shotgun under the passenger seat hums a low, familiar song. Come on, it whispers. Let’s dance.
The girl in his backseat hasn’t spoken in fifty miles. She clutches a stuffed rabbit missing an ear. Eight years old, maybe. Blonde hair matted to her skull. Mack doesn’t ask why she was standing alone on Route 9 in pajamas at 3 a.m. Doesn’t ask why her bare feet left no tracks in the snow. Doesn’t ask why the dog tags around her neck read HENDERSON, J. – same as the soldier he watched burn alive in a Kabul ditch twelve years ago.
“You see it too, don’t you?” the girl says, voice like radio static.
Mack’s knuckles whiten on the steering wheel. The trees lean closer. Shadows pool in the ditches, thick and oily. He’s seen this before. In the desert. In the mirror after too much bourbon.
“See what?” he lies.
She points at the road ahead. The rain twists into shapes as it falls. Not drops anymore, sinews, tendons, tiny bones clattering against the windshield. A deer carcass lies mangled in the road, ribs cracked outward like wings. The girl’s rabbit twitches in her hands.
Mack floors the gas. The truck lurches forward, tires screaming. The deer’s corpse scrapes the undercarriage, and for a heartbeat, the radio crackles to life. A man’s voice, sandpaper rough, rasps through the speakers… “You can’t outrun the debt, Garrick.”
The girl laughs. Not a child’s laugh. Something older. Hungrier.
Mack’s hand drifts toward the shotgun. The woods are gone now. Just endless road, bleeding oil-black under the headlights. The stuffed rabbit’s remaining eye glints silver in the dark.
“Almost there,” the girl says.
He doesn’t ask where.
Stephen Walker
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Stephen Walker
Unit 146317
PO Box 7169
Poole
BH15 9EL
United Kingdom