Today’s writing prompt and my response.
Day two for this week. Use the prompt however you like, one at a time, or pen a short story over as many as you like.
Door in the desert: pic prompt
Fifty miles from the gas station, the steering went. He wrenched the wheel to the left, hauled hard, stamped on the brake. The estate car slewed in the sandy verge and shuddered to a halt on the side of the road. More a track than a road. A short cut, suggested by the SatNav to save him an hour.
Damn damn bloody damn. He beat the wheel with his fists as the outside immediately assaulted the stationary vehicle. He checked his phone. No signal, of course. He calmed his rising panic. He had water, snack bars, spare gas. He would sit on the road side, rig himself a shade cover from the blanket in the back, and wait. Help would arrive.
Stepping out of the car brought back memories of his time working in the foundry – a harsh, dry heat which sucked the moisture from your skin, baked your eyes and spat your dessicated form back into the desert.
The sun beat at his head, and for an instant he carried a different image – of his and Mary’s honeymoon in the Maldives. The sun was fiery there too, but there was also the clear, sparkling ocean where they had swum with the bright fish, and afterwards lay in their cabin with the fan cooling the briny sweat from their langourous bodies. Oh to be there again, Mary by his side.
He grabbed his hat from the passenger seat and clamped it to his sweat-soaked hair. He resisted drinking any water until he’d sorted the shade cover, using Mary’s walking poles as props and tucking the blanket into the windows to hold them in place. He left the windows on the far side open, equalising the temperature.
While he worked, he glanced up and down the long, straight track.
Nothing, either way. He checked his phone again, put it back in his pocket.
Shade in place, he sat in the sand and leaned against the car door.
He allowed himself a sip of water. It was near midday and his slip of shade was barely enough to keep his upper body out of the fiery sun. He pulled his legs up and stared across at the bleak landscape, noticing it properly for the first time. Bare red hills rose abruptly from a sandy valley where rows of dead trees suggested some moron in the past considered this a good place for an orchard. People, eternal optimists.
He listened for the distant sound of an engine. And listened. He grew thirsty, resisted the urge to drink more than his self-rationed drop of water which had now grown warm. The heat pressed on his eyelids, bidding them close, sleep. He shook himself awake. He mustn’t fall asleep. A vehicle might come along, pass him by without seeing the shelter, noticing he was stranded. The thought had him crawling from the shade onto the broiling hotplate of the track.
The intensity of the sun struck him like a physical blow. He was about to dive back into his shelter when he spotted the structure on the other side of the track. It looked like something left over from a film set – a door frame made of rough-hewn dark wooden posts, and within the frame an equally rough solid door. He blinked. Had it been there all along? Or was he hallucinating? The heat, thirst, would do that to you.
He stepped towards the structure, expecting it to disappear, a mirage after all. It remained in place.
Two more steps got him there. He walked all the way around it. He reached out a sweaty hand and touched it. Solid. A hand-written sign hung on the door.
‘Welcome, stranger,’ it said in crudely cut letters. Below was a smaller, more neatly written notice carved into the door itself. ‘Wishes granted.’
Welcome? He smirked through the sweat pouring into his eyes. Yeah, such a welcoming place. He squinted at the trees. ‘Wishes granted.’ Had the door once been the entrance to a hidden haven of green vegetation? Did a stranger stranded, as he was, only have to open it to find refuge from the heat, a place of recovery?
He didn’t know what made him do it. In a rush of his own eternal optimism, he took hold of the wooden handle, pushed it down, and pulled open the door.
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