This is another of my six-sentence flash-fiction contributions.
- I make my living in a bubble.
- Behind a tough sheet of Plexiglas I watch fathers in New Jersey going to work before dawn, families vacationing in Arizona, mothers loading groceries in Chicago.
- I drive a big truck—garment loads from New York and produce from California, back and forth from coast to coast.
- The first time I saw an elephant blocking the road, I pulled over and sloshed through the roadside trees in the rain, trying to figure out where it had gone when I looked away.
- When it appeared for the third time, I realized I had issues I had to resolve.
- Dispatch threatened to reassigned my lovely truck when I decided to take some leave, but it was my life and I needed to sort it out.
Have to watch out for those elephants, especially the pink ones! Nice 6!
Very good, concise description of a long haul driver. Surely, a most difficult and strenuous way to earn a living. While the traveling might be appealing at times, the long hours must be grueling. No wonder your character was seeing elephants where there shouldn’t be!
Good Six! Glad you joined in this week 🙂
Follow the elephant! (seriously… if it was a garden-variety mis-seeing, say seeing ‘green’ instead of ‘red’ at traffic light, I’d be all kinds of ‘hand in your keys’.
But an elephant?!
thats a quadruped of another color entirely
I’m guessing he fell asleep at the wheel. Maybe time to consider another job.
Great SSS.
It’s a she, Pat, and she didn’t fall asleep. she was hallucinating. When I drove truck, I met more than one driver who was things in the road that weren’t there. It’s a product of long and inconsistent hours and being alone for months at a time except for shallow, meaningless conversations in truck stops. Dispatchers don’t allow drivers to go home or even drive by their homes because they’re afraid the drivers will quit, or get behind on their deliveries..