... in a Snowstorm
a short story
by Rosi Hamlin
$1 stories - it could be worse
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2012, Rosi Hamlin
All rights reserved
Author’s note: This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, business establishments, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Dedicated to the friend who always encouraged me to believe in myself. There is not now, never has been and never will be any such thing as MSP.
Fact.
a.n.m.w.
January 2012
“Not now, not now, you bastarding machine, Flattery!”
Amanda turned the key again, holding her breath and praying with every cell of her irreligious body for the VW to start. The things were meant to be reliable, for God’s sake. Vorsprung Durch Technik and all that. Or maybe that was something else. Something German, at any rate. The best cars in the world. Probably.
She was always a little disappointed when people asked why she called her car ‘Flattery’. Didn’t they know, right away? She turned the key again, hoping that today, of all days, Flattery would get her somewhere.
The car jerked, spluttered like a 60-a-day octogenarian who’d skipped this winter’s flu vaccination, whined and then died again. Her first instinct was to find something heavy to beat the vehicle into submission with, or to kill it properly, but she held her breath and counted to ten, glancing at the ‘WWJD’ band she wore on her left wrist.
She gave a dreamy smile that she would have described as vomit-inducing had she seen it on another woman. Or on a man for that matter. Although deeply irreligious, she’d spent the past two years using the WWJD method of calm. “What Would Jeff Do?” Most probably, Jeff would be laughing at her, with his deep, thrilling and wonderful baritone chuckle. More dreamy smile.
She couldn’t wait to hear that laugh again in person. Long distance relationships had their positive points. No horror at unspeakable things involving the bathroom for one; toilet seats left up, toothpaste tops left off, toilet paper hanging the ‘wrong way’, noxious odours and no dog to blame them on. No kitchen wars over teabags left in the sink, or battles over whose turn it was to clear up after a meal. No harsh words spoken over untidy piles of laundry in the bedroom, or hogging of the bedclothes, or snoring. But nothing could substitute the feeling of him stroking her hair while she nuzzled her face into the crook of his neck. Fact.
Amanda tried the car again. This time, Flattery purred into life. She clapped and patted the dashboard in gratitude. She turned on the GPS navigation, not because she wasn’t familiar with the roads to the airport, but because it amused her to ignore the instructions. She would set a destination nowhere near where she was going and studiously ignore all commands to turn left at the next junction. She hoped, one day, to get the computer lady to swear and say, “All right, bitch ... find it yourself, then. I’m done.” They had those ‘Easter egg’ codes buried deep in all sorts of software, so it was only reasonable to expect that some disgruntled employee had snuck one into the navigation devices. They wouldn’t even have to have been that disgruntled, she thought. If she knew how to do it, she would, just for fun.
She gave a quick glance around the interior of the car, wishing she’d given it a proper valet clean, but it was just about presentable enough for Very Important Passengers. She set off into the freezing morning. The sky looked heavy and grey, as if it had just pulled an 18-hour shift restacking the freezers in a supermarket, with no toilet break. It was definitely going to dump something on them later.
She hoped it would snow. That would be like a lucky omen, or something. The night she’d met Jeff - on holiday in the States - she’d been trying to get in a round of drinks in a crowded bar. Despite her being 5’9”, she’d had trouble attracting the attention of the busy bar staff. It was probably a disadvantage that she was polite and slightly timid. More than likely, they were used to more forceful customers. And so she’d resigned herself to the wait, taking the opportunity to have a good nosey around at all the locals in the throng who’d turned up to the live music night.
Part of the reason the bar staff probably couldn’t hear her was the raucous laughter coming from the group next to her. A tall, dark-haired man with his back to her was regaling them with some story. It seemed to involve a truck, cell phones, songs from Disney movies and abandoning people in the snow. Crazy Americans.
In one of those unexpected, horrifying dips in the volume of the crowd, he had quite clearly heard her mutter: “...that just sounds mean to me.” He’d turned around and looked her slowly, speculatively, up and down. Mostly up, it had to be said, which was a good thing. It saved her the embarrassment of him seeing her toes curling up in her flip-flops when she was treated to his full attention. The voices and the clink of glasses and the scraping of bar stool legs across the stone floor had kicked in again, but since he was right in front of her, she had no trouble making him out when he spoke to her.
“Oh, I’d never throw you out in a snowstorm...”