Morning all. Ready to dive into the morning prompt and get this day started? I know I am. So timers set and lets jump into this. Fifteen minutes please.
I think I forgot this was plural as I was writing and so they became she. I do like the scene though. I would add actual plot bits throughout if it was part of the story. No clue why she is driving or where she is going but I might be able to use this scene in another story at some point so a scene without a plot isn’t a bad thing from a writing prompt.
Thursday, March 5th: They watched the mirror fall from the truck.
They watched the mirror fall from the truck. It had been sliding for the last few miles. Cassie was far enough back that speeding up to warn the truck of impending doom was not an option. She saw the wink of the mirror reflecting the sun as her first indication that it was there. She wondered briefly if it was signaling any overhead aircraft.
The sky above was clear. There weren’t even any clouds, just a long stretch of deep blue painted across the firmament. “So, no planes crashing due to mirror signals.”
A few minutes later she realized the light shining from the mirror seemed to be sending out a spotlight at a slightly different angle. It was still a spotlight. She dropped her speed slightly and tried to figure out if it was the angle of the landscape or the mirror itself shifting.
The ground was flat and she looked in her rear view. The road behind her was flat as well. There were no sneaky inclines that stretched imperceptibly upwards until you found yourself somehow at a higher elevation having climbed a hill unknowingly. The land was flat.
“But it starts sloping ahead.’ She thought. The truck in front of her seemed to accelerate. She checked her speed. While she initially dropped off to check the angle and the land, she wasn’t going that much slower than before. They definitely sped up.
The truck went over a bump in the road, and the spotlight shook and shivered. “Just moving around in the truck bed,” she decided. Not a problem for her at all. She had been on the road for nearly ten hours at this point and the landscape around them wasn’t very interesting. For a while she amused herself with signs for roadside attractions but in this stretch, there weren’t any.
The mirror and its slightly changing angle were the most interesting things she could see and she somehow found her mind focusing on it. She wondered where the truck was going and why they were moving. Was it a person moving all their worldly possessions. Had someone cleared out a house after a family death? Was it less personal? She couldn’t tell from this distance. A blue tarp covered an irregularly shaped mass and the mirror seemed to have been tucked up under the ropes binding the tarp to the truck.
The two of them were the only vehicles on the road. The mirror shifted again and this time it sent a ray of sun directly at her windshield. She already had her sunglasses on. She turned on her blinker and shifted lanes. She could hear her father’s voice in her head reminding her that the left hand lane was for faster vehicles and should only be used when she wanted to pass other vehicles, but the shift meant she wasn’t directly in the light beam the mirror was shooting back.
Still at this point she thought it was just moving around under its rope bindings. The beam of light seemed to be getting lower but then it stopped, steadied. She didn’t know if there was a bump or not but all of a sudden, the mirror made a mad dash for freedom. Glowing with sunlight it slammed into the asphalt and shattered into a million glittering shards of light. The truck did not notice or did not care, it kept going.
Ten til Midnight 