I missed the cut of by just over an hour *sad face* but I liked the scene that I created anyway, as part of the ongoing Lauren and Paul story.
{image via Menage Monday challenge – additional prompts were someone or something being turned to stone, and using the phrase “pieces of”}
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The desert rushed by, the rumble of rubber hitting bitumen the only sound filling the silence. The conversation had jerked to a halt hours before, and Lauren felt her eyes grow heavy as she stared out at the blur out the window. Brown and blue, sometimes a flash of red. The road trip holiday has seemed like a good idea at the time, but now the car was starting to feel claustrophobic. As the miles passed by, the rhythm of the sounds and the warmth of the car took hold, and Lauren gave in, and dozed.
A sudden change in the sounds jerked her awake, as Paul pulled the car off the highway onto a dirt track, the gravel crunched beneath them as he eased to a stop just past the sign, and they stretched, glad to be free of the confines of the car and each other. Still, the words between them would not form, as they stood silently, hand in hand, and drank in the wide landscape, dotted with sculptures, seeming less like art, and more like weary travelers, caught under a curse, turned to stoned.
Taking it all in, pieces of Lauren’s dream, fragments of fear, splintered by wakefulness slowly came back together as her attention was captured by the sculpture to her left. A wooden bench. A sandstone couple. Him sitting, shoulders hunched, head in his hands, as she stood with her back to him, searching for answers the desert refused to yield. Please, don’t let that be us, she silently begged, as she turned to Paul, and buried her head in his shoulder, hoping, as her tears soaked his shirt, that his strong embrace would be enough to save them both.
~~~
Look at that, two flash fictions in a week! Lauren and Paul is currently at 5735 words, and a long way to go – not bad for a story that I was originally hoping to take out to 5-8,000!
Well that worked!!