Yesterday I went for a drive northward, and came home with a little very-short story. (There really is a Red Line Diner, on Route 9 just north of the intersection with Interstate 84. I don’t know if it’s named for a map line, a travel line, or something else.)
I kind of like it! It was going to be a somewhat longer story, but as soon as I wrote what is now the last line, my mind informed me that it was done. I looked back to see if various things that I’d planned to put in would fit somewhere earlier, but only the scene with the lady and the model release outside the low commercial building made it in. And it was originally longer, too. It was going to have something like:
“You’re a professional photographer? That must be so interesting.”
“What do you do?”
She nodded toward the low building. “We do customer service for magazine syndicates. When someone fills out a blow-in card and mails it in, we put it into the system.”
“Don’t people do that on their phones or whatever now?”
“Oh, yes! If more people mailed in, we wouldn’t have a five-person office handling nearly fifty different magazines. We also handle it if someone’s account gets into a bad way, or if the system can’t find the correct address on its own.”
“So you have to read all the addresses people write on those cards?”
“Thankfully not; we feed the mail into the system, and it only gives back the ones it can’t read. Not many, usually.”
Which I like thinking about, but didn’t have a place in the story as it turned out.
They also made another stop:
A few beams of late sunlight were filtering through the clouds as she had me pull off by an old church. It was weathered white clapboard, looking neither abandoned nor occupied. I leaned against the car as she worked her way around the building, and then went inside. After a little while she called out the door.
“I’m gonna sit in here for a bit. Join me if you like!”
I stayed outside, stretching and looking around at the land. We were heading for a line of high hills or low mountains. The clouds continued to thin as the sun worked its way westward. Three semitrailers rumbled by together, with Amazon and FedEx logos on the sides.
She came out eventually, and we got back into the car.
“How’s God doing?” I asked.
“She’s good.”
That might have fit in, but it felt a bit extra; the Jesus Saves sign was really all it needed.
The car radio played Jim Croce’s “Operator” (“She’s living in LA, with my best old ex-friend Ray; a man she said she knew well and sometimes hated”), but it turned out to be unnecessary to mention. The author also overheard a snippet of conversation on the way out of the Diner:
A group of half a dozen other diners left at the same time we did.
“Just a joke,” one of them said, with an easy hostility, “big fuggin’ joke.”
What else?
Oh, right! There was a whole extra thing about their relationship, as in:
The royalties from her first two books, plus ongoing commissions and licensing, were enough for her to keep an (underpaid) assistant (me), but small enough that we slept in the car, or shared a room at a discount motel. In separate beds, because that’s where we were then.
and then the ending was originally going to be something like:
She settled down on her bed with the DSLR and her laptop, looking through the recent shots.
I went outside into the gathering twilight. The sky was nearly clear over the hills behind the Old Colony Motel, loud with crickets. Every few minutes a car or truck passed on the highway.
Do we stop yearning when we get what we want? I don’t think so. If only because we already feel its loss.
Ooooh. But all told I think it worked better to leave the question unanswered.
ceoln 