Short Story

A short Story that I had to write for class It had to involve a truck and a song. The song is Hey Joe. It's only a second draft, so feel free to comment, edit, critic, etc. Try to keep all comments something that you'd be willing to say in front of Mary Jane

Mary, god damned Mary. Thought was hard, but that one came back again and again. Her fault. Punching the steering wheel, his horn screamed out across the highway, earning him a finger from the jeep ahead of him. He was speeding, but how else could he drive, so entangled in his rage. Racing down the highway, his truck had become a black bullet, a carrier of death. Dark as hell itself, it was a beast of a machine. Passed down by his father, much like his temper, it had survived countless days of hard work and long drives. The radio was on, but it served as nothing more than background music for a man driving towards death. “Hers.” The first word he had spoken since entering his black pickup minutes before. As he drove along, the thrumming and banging of the engine echoed his own feelings. Anyone on the highway that day who happened to see that fated car drive was faced with two things. First, the driver was very angry and very drunk. Second, the car was frightening. It was unexplainable, and many will deny it now, but anyone who saw it remembers the chill that hit them and the fear that filled their minds. Rage simply oozed from the truck, and all nearby could feel it.

Cheating whore. His temper burst, and for the first time, he felt only empty space. Pain and loneliness slammed into him, and his car swerved as his vision, already doubled from the bar, swam with tears. Looking around the car, he struggled to find some way to pull himself out of his hole. Memories filed away somewhere in his head, began flying to the surface, uncalled and unwanted. He had met her at a bar called Midnight Joe’s, and they had drunkenly fumbled their way into love. He had problems, but so did she, and they had gotten married a year later. The honeymoon had been spectacular, the best week of his life. As he began to lose himself in reminisce, his truck slowed down, giving him time to contemplate.

Down the highway and across a few roads, Mary and her lover slept, both unaware of the drama that played out so close to them. She awoke briefly once, fear pounding through her body, but once up reason took over and she slept nearly as soundly as before. Gus, their neighbor, had called as soon as he had seen the strange man walk into Mary’s arms. Faithlessness never settled with him, and he always liked to help a friend. Now, he simply waited on his porch and slowly smoked his cigarettes, calmly waiting for the final act.

As the truck pulled off the highway, the radio, which had been content as background music, spoke up once, “Going down to shoot my old lady, you know I caught her messing around with another man.” As he caught the lyrics, his rage, which had slipped under the mass of other emotions he had felt, blew up, and he was filled with the madness. His hands clenched hard on the wheel, thick cords of muscle straining up his arms. His mind went black, save a sick hatred of Mary. “Mine” it whispered, “No one else’s, mine”. As he drove the final few streets, one hand moved slowly, lovingly towards the paper bag on the seat next to him. His foot pressed hard, and he sped towards the end of his tale. They found his car the next morning, a few yards off the road, windshield gone. He was found deeper in the woods, wrapped around one of the bigger trees. They never found the gun; it had flown under a few rocks. When the police came to tell Mary, she opened the door with a smile, thinking her husband had returned. A smile which quickly fell into tears as they told her the details in a clipped brisk manner. The whole day she was filled with guilt, the knowledge that she had spent the last hours of her husband’s life in bed with another. She never knew that she had been found out. Gus was the only one who knew the whole tale, and he still talks about it to this day. In fact since Mary moved out of the neighborhood, just stop and ask for a beer, and he’ll tell you the tale always ending with a small smile, which hints at sadness, that Mary’s life was saved by the very booze that would have sparked her death.

 

No one has any criticisms, suggestions or observations? A story is only as good as it's rewrites, and I could use some help editing so on.

 

Ta Bump. Just cause I'd love to get some opinions. This is one of the stories I'm thinking about trying to publishing, so the more the better.