The other day I was driving north on Cox Road.  If you aren’t familiar with the area, it’s a sort of mashup of industry, farms, and blue-collar housing.  About a quarter-mile from SR520, rolling as fast as his arms could propel him was a one-legged man in a wheelchair.  Dressed in a sleeveless sweatshirt and shorts, his face was taught and red from exertion, his expression was of one frantic to escape some imminent threat.  As he pushed himself along hurriedly, he kept looking backwards as if to check the progress of whoever or whatever was coming after him.

It didn’t take long before I discovered what that threat was.  Perhaps a hundred yards behind him came a thick woman, about average height and stocky, moving towards him steadily, but not hurrying, not running, not in pursuit. She moved is if she knew that she would inevitably catch him.  On the whole, she did not look threatening, just the opposite, in fact.  She looked ordinary.  An ordinary woman in an ordinary dress with ordinary shoes with an ordinary cigarette in her right hand.

As I passed them I looked back to see if something extraordinary might occur, to see what happened next.  But I didn’t see what happened next.  They faded from my rearview mirror.  I came to the intersection with SR524 and turned east.  They were gone, but the mystery remained.

• I couldn’t see the woman’s left hand. What might it have contained—a gun, a knife, a cleaver?
• Maybe she wasn’t the threat, perhaps he was, and she was just trying to bring him home, to safety.
• What would happen when his arms finally tired and he could no longer push himself along the shoulder of the road?
• What would they say?
• What would they do?
• Did he feel that he threatened, would he defend himself?

So many questions.  So many unknowns.  I guess I’ll have to answer them at some point.  Or maybe this strange ballet will show up in my next novel.  For now that doesn’t really matter.  The important thing is keep watch along the side of the road, because what occurs in real life is often more strange and fascinating than I could fantasize for my fiction.

©Copyright 2018 by Kevin Fraleigh