Quo Vadis, Baby 5 |
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in sunlight and wind, and when he looks behind him, her smile is wide and filled with little chicklet teeth, and life is good. Her clothes are dried within an hour and they go off the road and she changes clothes behind a large rock. Then they are off again, through the howling tunnel of the wind. This is so cool.
A little bit after noon, they come to a small town, a crossroads with a few houses and stores and a diner huddled close together trying to keep each other warm. They go into the diner and look at the menu, and Max is happy and chatty and Ellen nods and smiles and orders macaroni and cheese. And a shake of course. Have to have a shake.
After lunch, as Max sips at his steaming coffee, she goes to the ladies room in the back. He decides that a slice of cherry pie would complete this meal, and he is halfway through it before he realizes she hasn’t come back. He hopes that she hasn’t started bleeding again. She seems like a tough little kid, and pretty stable, considering what happened to her. And it isn’t like he can go scooting in there after her. He starts chatting up the waitress, a skinny woman of indeterminate age who seems like she might like a biker, and before he realizes it, Ellen has been gone half an hour.
The waitress nods sympathetically when he asks her to go check on the girl. She is back in a minute with a torn-off piece of menu on which Ellen has written in block letters:
I’M SORRY. I THINK I’M RUNNING TOWARD IT NOW. THANK YOU.
Max doesn’t know what to do. The waitress asks if he wants her to call the police and he says not to bother, he thinks he knows where she’s gone. The waitress says there is a bus which goes through town every day, it left maybe fifteen minutes ago, going west. He says thanks, and goes outside and sits on his bike a long long time, nodding and smiling, then he heads east like the howling wind.
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All work within this periodical is copyrighted by the authors and Big Pond Rumour, January 2008. No part is to be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the authors and Big Pond Rumour Press. |