A Flower for a Lost Grave

Fiction

Image by k_newman from Pixabay

It’s right rare that someone asks me to take them down a road I don’t know — been traveling the backroads of Teyach going on twenty years, and the only ones I don’t know are those little sandy, marshy stretches in the inside. Figures that’s where the lady wanted me to take her. She wasn’t much of a talker, wouldn’t even give me her name. She just sat there in the passenger seat with her eyes fixed on the horizon, those dried up flowers crinkling in her grip. Not that I didn’t try to make conversation — drive mile after mile through silt that’s aching to swallow your tires whole, and you just have to say something, even if it ends up being to yourself.

I say, “Little late for me to say this, ma’am, but I reckon fresh flowers are traditional. I’m thinking yours are dead.”

The lady snaps her eyes from the road for the first time in a good half-hour. “Never you mind, you…Caxey, you said your name was?”

I say, “That’s right, ma’am.”

The lady says, “You’re acting all polite now, but you’re being real familiar, Caxey. Now, I’m paying you, and I’m paying you to drive this wicked truck of yours to a certain place, and you’re gonna do it, hear?”

I say, “Yes ma’am, just being friendly. Won’t bother you if you don’t want.”