Desert Mirage (My entry in the Washington Post's fiction contest)

So, in the February 10th edition of the Washington Post Magazine, they announced that they are sponsoring a contest for original short fiction dealing with the theme of love and based on the image on the cover. When I can figure out how to get my scanner to work, I'll post the image on the cover.

Although, I still haven't finished my other short stories and am pretty rusty at writing fiction, I made it a goal to enter a story in the contest. My entry is found below. In my opinion, it's not my best work, (although I tried) but it is complete and got entered before the May 2nd deadline. (I guess this one is more about following through than anything else.)

"Desert Mirage"

For my seventeenth birthday, I tried to give myself the gift of freedom. At sixteen going on seventeen, I was still young enough to believe that if you ran fast enough, you could break the thread of your own history -- and once you broke free, who knew where you'd end up? I had days where I imagined myself riding off into the sunset with a rugged young cowboy from one of the nearby ranches or driving to Las Vegas to become a famous dancer. Other days, though, felt like millstones around my neck. They literally dragged me down beneath the surface of time and left me suspended, watching impotently as the river of life passed over me. I felt like a female Pinocchio, waiting to become a real girl. I hung on woodenly, one hand clinging to the smooth, glossy surfaces of dreams while the other fought to pull me up over the rough edges of reality.

If you stand out too much in a small town, you're bound to see trouble. Living outside of town on a chicken farm, with two parents born out of state, and flaming red hair in a land of brunettes and bottle-blonds, I was a freak from the word “Go”. By my teens, I had built up a hard shell of delinquency. I spent a lot of time with the tougher young ranch hands from around the area. As I approached my seventeenth year, I still hadn't gotten into any serious trouble yet, but there was no doubt around town that some of those ranch hands were hoping it was only a matter of time.

The morning I turned seventeen, the sky was blue and clear. My favorite ranch hand at the time was a boy of nineteen with red hair like my own. He'd skip out pretty regularly on his morning chores to drive me to school and that morning was no exception. As I lay with my head on his shoulder, staring up into the open sky, I let my young chauffeur kiss me goodbye, first once, then twice, then ... oh, I don't know. I felt the his desire swallow me whole, then spit me out again, like Jonah's big fish. I washed up on the shore of the schoolyard exhilarated to be alive. I kissed him one last time with just enough passion to let him taste my excitement, then headed into homeroom.

The thing about homeroom was Stacy Carmichael, a bouncy, bossy blond and head of the cheer leading squad. With the sky so blue, I'd almost believed I could forget she was there. But with Stacy, almost isn't enough. I'd only been sitting on the floor studying for a couple of minutes when she burst into the room, smirking to one of her friends as she looked down at me. As she tried to step over me, she tripped on one of my books and called me “a stupid carrot topped freak”. The baby blue of the day flashed bright red. Her mouth hadn't even closed yet when I punched her in the face, breaking her two front teeth and a bone in my left hand. It wasn't the first fight I'd been in that year; I was suspended immediately and sent home.

Once I was off the school grounds I stood at a cross road. There wasn't much to do in town on a week day, but going home seemed pointless. I could imagine the scene at my house. The Carmichaels would already be on the phone, threatening legal action if my parents didn't do something “to fix that out-of-control daughter of yours”. I could see my mother standing in the hallway, tears springing into her eyes as she listened to the tirade. “Why are you doing this to us?” She'd ask me accusingly when I showed up.

“I'm not doing anything to you!” I muttered under my breath. “You think it's easy to be me in this crappy little town? If anything, you're doing it to ME! Everyone thinks we're freaks 'cause we're not from around here – and I was BORN here!” To emphasize my point, I turned down the road away from my house and headed towards the ranch. I'd already broken one thing today and I was feeling reckless enough to break another. I half hoped if I broke enough things, there wouldn't be anything left to hold me.

Up the road at the ranch, I spotted one of the other ranch hands near the road. “Where's Eric?” I asked. “Working over that away in the barn,” he said, pointing with his thumb, “but if you're looking for trouble, maybe I could help.” He added the last bit with a wink. I ignored him and turned toward the barn. I could already see Eric coming out the door. With his red hair, he stood out even from a distance.

By nightfall, we were on the road, headed for Vegas. Our plan didn't consist of much more than a desire to make it to one of those drive-through chapels and get married. Ever since I'd first kissed him, Eric had been asking me to marry him. It was now or never. I couldn't leave, though, without taking something from home. Before we left, I crept back into my house and grabbed the first thing I saw lying on the counter – my father's wedding ring. “Something borrowed,” I whispered nervously to myself as I headed out the door, slipping it onto my finger.

The next morning dawned under an open desert sky. We'd driven through the night in Eric's old convertible and I'd fallen asleep against his shoulder. The sky was so clean and blue when I woke that I felt I could cut a fresh start out of it. “Something blue,” I laughed and Eric looked puzzled until I pointed at the sky. Then he smiled and winked.

By late morning, though, the sky had begun to cloud up a little, and I didn't feel so sure about Vegas. When I glanced at Eric, though, he was looking resolutely ahead.

It was a little before noon when the sheriff and my father caught up with us on the Nevada border. The sheriff took Eric off to the side of the road while my father got into the car with me.

“Son, this girl's a minor.” I could hear the sheriff saying to Eric. “If her father chooses to press charges, you're looking at some serious jail time.” Eric just looked down, scuffing the dirt with his boot.

In the car my father looked at me for a long moment, his eyes weary. Finally he shook his head, then kind of shrugged his shoulders and asked, “Why did you run away with this boy?”

When I didn't answer, he glanced at me again, saw his ring on my finger, and suddenly barked in a voice he'd never used with me before, “Answer ME!”

“I HATE living there!” I said, bursting into tears, “You don't know how much I hate it.”

When I got back home we never talk about what had happened. The only time my mother ever mentioned it again was the day of my father's funeral. At the time, I was struggling through graduate school and didn't know whether to drop out or to continue. After the service at the church, my mother invited me back to her place for lunch.

“I want to tell you something about your father,” she said. “I know you think he never understood you. After the trouble with that boy from the ranch, I saw how you kept him at a distance. I know at the time you thought you knew what love was, but you didn't. Let me tell you what it meant to your father.

“Your father's dream was to be a cowboy. Unfortunately growing up back east he didn't realize that ranching is a family business, something you grow up doing, not something you hire yourself into. We'd already married before he came to the realization that ranching wasn't going to be his life. Your older brother was born shortly after we married, and then you come along. One day he took a look at his life and realized that the image of the lone cowboy riding over the hill into the sunset didn't include a family and he had one.”

At that she paused and looked down at her hands, lost in thought. After a couple of seconds, she spoke again.

“Some men I've known would have left at that point,” she continued, her voice catching a little, “but he loved me and you kids too much to walk out on us for a dream.”

“Of course, he never would have told you any of this. He was too decent for that. I'm only telling you now because I want you to understand what it means to really love someone. He didn't just give up that dream for me; he gave it up for you, too.”

I'm older now, approaching middle age. To look at me, you might believe I've been this old forever – I know my kids do. The weight of all these years is only an anchor on my body, though, not my heart. There's still something about the empty blue of an open desert sky that gets to me. When I first see it, it makes me think of promises about to be made. It's only after the night falls and the clouds roll in that I think about how most promises end up broken. Still, in the morning, when the rain falls and the desert blooms and you see that image shimmering on the road just up ahead, I can't help but to believe the world is still good – even for all its broken promises.