Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY
IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I
generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls
its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write
down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote,
website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will
simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test
or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes
of them.
H Trope: Spiders
Nanami Ng stared
down at the steering wheel of her Driver’s Training car and said, “I heard
like, all of these cars got recalled.”
The driver’s
trainer, Marcus, looked up from his tablet computer and said, “What?”
Lan Cai leaned
forward from the back seat, sticking his head between them. “Wasn’t it spiders
or something?”
“What?” Marcus
exclaimed.
Lan turned to
Nanami and said, “Yeah. They were like sucking all the gasoline out of some car
– like wasn’t it a BMW or something?”
Nanami said,
“Mazda, and they didn’t drink gasoline. That would be stupid.”
“What would you
know about stupid? You can’t even pass the bio test without writing the answers
on your hand.”
Nanami blushed
deeply, though mostly just her ears turned red. Marcus said, “Get driving! We
don’t have time to waste on stupid Halloween stories.”
“It wasn’t a
Halloween story! It was real?”
Lan turned to look
at Marcus and said, “Hey, Nanami might not be able to test herself out of a
paper bag, but...”
Both of them
pushed him back into the back seat and Marcus said, “Your opinion stinks as bad
as your breath.”
Nanami laughed as
she pulled with jerky pedal pumping out from in front of the school. Marcus
said, “You haven’t spent much time practicing, have you Nanami?”
“My dad won’t
drive with me! Our car was in the garage! The battery was dead! I was so busy
with school!”
From the back
seat, Lan sat with his arms crossed over his chest. He muttered, “More like you
were too busy lip-locked with the bf.”
“You’re just
jealous!” Nanami shot over her shoulder. The car screeched to a stop just
before she ran over four ninth grade girls. “I didn’t hit the brakes!” she
shouted.
“Good thing I was
watching, then, wasn’t it?” Marcus said, making a mark on his clipboard. “That’s
the second time this week I had to use the brake. One more time and you’ll have
to take a two week break and then start all over again.”
“That’s not fair!”
Nanami and Lan exclaimed together.
Marcus looked back
over the seat at Lan, then across at Nanami. He said, “I don’t make the rules.
I just enforce them. If you two want to file a grievance, start talking to the
camera.” He gestured to a spot just above the read-view mirror. A red dot
glowed there, recording their words and actions.
Scowling, Nanami
edged ahead slowly as a car behind them laid on their horn. She got out to the
side road and drove to the stop sign, rolling slowly to a halt. The car behind
them honked again. She opened her mouth to comment, then closed it, rolling
forward. She was driving past the playground, suddenly tense as a couple of
little kids playing on the swings jumped off and started chasing each other.
The kids ran toward the houses, away from the road and she was so busy watching
them that she didn’t see the car stop at the light. Marcus slammed on the car’s
brakes. “That’s it,” he said. “Let’s go back.”
Nanami looked at
him and despite the car behind them that started honking. She stuck her fist
out the window, flipped them off and then stomped on the brake, then kept
stomping on it as she shouted, “Just practicing! Practicing stopping! See! I’m
practicing.” She stomped harder and harder, screaming. “Practice! Practice!
Practice!”
“Calm down!”
Marcus said. A sizzling sound came from the dashboard, like something was on
fire.
“Sounds like
squirrels are in the engine,” Nanami said.
All three of them
were staring at the dashboard when the ashtray popped open and a dozen red spiders came out,
followed by more and more and...
Names: ♀Japan, Singapore; ♂ Vietnam, Taiwan
No comments:
Post a Comment