Linking with Poets United for lovely Magaly's Telling Tales: A Pantry of Prose Month #3 The subject is Phobias. We can also choose to take an old poem and turn it into a story in 313 words or less. (Mine is 312.)
I hope you will join us!
Note:
This is mostly fiction, only a few details are true. I took a morsel of what is and ran with it. I hope you like it.
Some things we go through in life, leave a lasting mark,
like a skid mark on the highway, serving as a constant reminder of what was and
what will never be. From the time I was
a child, fear was fed to me like peanut butter and jelly. It always did get stuck on the roof of my
mouth, leaving a taste on my tongue that would not soon disappear. Fear is like that, it sticks with you and can
be hard to swallow and wash away. I watched my mother and her mother before her
suffer from the affliction of fear, and the hold that it can have on you when
it is deep inside you.
I have found freedom and fear do not co-exist in the same
place. If you hold fear, freedom is far
from your reach indeed. When I was 22
years old driving home with a friend from a dinner party, I hit a deer on a
country road. It all happened so
fast. A figure came moving in, my tires
skidding on the pavement, and my car colliding with the gentlest of God’s
creatures, ending up in a deep ravine.
That is all I remember; the rest is a blur that crosses
lines of the truth and what was never spoken.
I am still here, wishing I could go back and make it never happen. So many times, I tried to drink away the
memory of it, but unlike taking out a bullet in the wild west, the whiskey only
made it hurt more deeply.
You see I am still here, but my friend, a wild eyed French major,
wearing no seat belt is not. Gregg was
only 24 and had plans larger than life.
I have never gotten behind the wheel again. It is through this, I came to better
understand my mother.
©Carrie Van Horn 2019
