Writing Exercise: Week Five
I’d been driving for about half an hour and although the car had skidded on ice a few times, the drive hadn’t been too bad. But just as I was starting to relax, the drive got really, really bad.
I crept along at about 10km, edging towards the top of a hill. I eased my foot off the gas, hoping that if I crested the hill slowly enough, I wouldn’t need to tap the breaks on the way down.
No such luck. As soon as the front end of the car peeked over the top of the hill, the wheels hit ice.
The car started sliding into a lane of oncoming traffic. To make matters worse, that ‘oncoming traffic’ was a tractor-trailer.
The truck driver honked at me, but there wasn’t anything I could do to get out of his way. When I tapped the breaks, the car fishtailed. When I turned the steering wheel, the car swerved this way and that, but I still didn’t have control.
My car picked up speed as it slid down the hill, quickly closing the distance to the truck. I thought for sure we were going to collide. Then suddenly my wheels found some traction on all of the snow and ice. I jerked the wheel to the right and thankfully, the car moved they way I wanted it to.
Sort of. The car went too far to the right and crashed into a fence along the side of the road. I’ll never forget the ‘thud’ of impact.
The fence forced the car to a stop and on shaky legs, I got out and looked at the damage. There were some pretty big dents and lots of scratched paint, but it was nothing compared to the damage there would have been if I’d crashed into the truck.
And lastly, in the spirit of tracking my reading during my NIAY adventures, here's what I read last week:
- Florence of Arabia by Christopher Buckley
- The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
- The first hundred or so pages of Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
- And of course, way too much fan fiction by too many fabulous authors to name them all here!