Odyssey
A Thursday Prompt story
© 2021 by Walter Reimer

Prompt: reaching


I was headed up to a convention, and in keeping with the old adage Never let your reach exceed your grasp, I decided as one does that I’d take it in two long but comparatively easy steps, spending the night in a hotel at what I would consider an appropriate halfway point.

So I made a list, including my furbrushes (hey, I may be a mangy old dog, but I’m not a barbarian, I’m just retired), got the car checked out, and I left an hour ahead of schedule on a Wednesday morning. ‘Ahead of schedule’ meant that I left at four in the morning instead of the five A.M. that I had planned. Still, so far, so good, right?

Yeah.

The convention is being held out of state, and allow me to acquaint you with a phenomenon I like to call The Weird Shit-o-Tron. The WST seems to kick in whenever I leave Florida for any reason, and among other things will always have at least one tropical storm or other weather pattern looming on the horizon. To cite an example, I went vacation to southern Germany one year, and in the time I was away a rogue nation set off its first-ever nuclear device (frigging pony bomb; I could’ve done better in my garage, for Pete’s sake), there was a tropical storm menacing Florida, an earthquake in Hawai’i, and someone accidentally crashed a small plane into an apartment block in New York City. So, yeah, I left my home knowing full well that some mental shit might be in the offing.

About two hundred miles into my journey it started to rain. When I mean rain, I mean a downpour so bad that I lost sight of the highway, not just the lane I was supposed to be in. I did like everyone was doing, and hit my flashers as I dumped speed to a relative crawl. It was a very long ten minutes, and then the weather cleared, only to hit me again as I stopped heading north and began heading west.

The weather cleared as I turned north again and headed into Alabama, and stayed pleasant until I reached my predetermined waypoint and stopped for the night.

The new day dawned early (for me, at least) and this time it was fog cloaking the highway. Yay. The sun managed to burn it all off when I neared Birmingham, which was nice. The rush hour traffic was moving along quite nicely, and I started looking out for my turning point so I could resume my westward track. I hit the exit ramp, dumped speed, turned left . . .

And I hear this godawful thupthupthupthupthup . . . and the tire pressure gauge on my dashboard lights up.

Christ on a pegging ladder . . . yep, one piece each flat tire, left rear.

And I’d been doing so well, also, too.

So I get the ridiculous spare out of the trunk, mumbling “Fuck” all the while because you’re supposed to do that, it’s even in the manuals, my tail swinging back and forth angrily and so hard it was stirring up a nice breeze, and get the tire changed. The left rear tire had a chunk gouged out of it on the inside (facing the axle) where the tread and sidewall meet, so there’s no use patching the bugger.

A passer-by commiserated and recommended a tire place about a mile away – great! I limped over to the place, and while they didn’t have an exact replacement (theirs was a little narrower and higher-pressured, but fit on the same wheel), they replaced it and only charged me forty-five dollars. Most excellent, but I was now about an hour off my schedule.

I made up part of the time by basically [REDACTED UPON ADVICE OF COUNSEL] the speed limit, arriving near the convention hotel in time for lunch.

So that’s that. I’m here, ready to enjoy my convention.

Oh, the Weird Shit-o-Tron? Have you seen the news lately? Keep watching the skies!


end