BLOG NUMBER FIFTY-SIX: THE TINIEST COG BEARS THE BIGGEST BRUNT...

GETAWAY CAR by Steven Holding.

Her earliest memories were of the junkyard. An acre of untamed thorns, littered with decaying automobiles, cordoned off by a swaying fence. Strict warnings to stay away only served to increase her curiosity. Ambling past, she would linger outside, fingers entwined with the wire mesh. Gazing at the broken machines, desire would eat away at her insides: how she longed to dance among the ruined hunks of metal. 

Shuffling towards adolescence, the yard was gutted, a wooden FOR SALE sign hung upon its entrance. The area became a teenage hang-out, kids hopping over the gate, mischief in mind. She was with a group of them when they unearthed the last, forgotten motor. Devoured completely by an angry thicket of brambles, the car was rendered almost invisible by its blanket of camouflage. A passageway, hacked through the overgrown bushes, allowed access. Once inside, cocooned by the skeleton of the wreck, it felt as if the interlocking branches had swallowed the entire world. Hidden away, everybody did everything in there. Even she could not resist such temptations.

Stories spread about the ancient jalopy: how it had been involved in a hit and run, killing a little kid. A suicide, a rape; a shifting list of sins, each committed in the backseat. The truth, of course, was irrelevant. Time passed. Eventually the empty lot was purchased. What became of the car was soon just another unanswered mystery.

Her husband bought a house in the estate built upon the land. As far as she could tell, her new home stood exactly where the abandoned heap had been.

The first time the car appeared in her living room coincided with the very first beating he gave her. Sprawled upon the carpet, looking up through a veil of blood, snot and tears, she reached towards it with a trembling hand. The cold touch of steel confirmed that the vehicle was no hallucination. Slipping into unconsciousness, she awoke the next morning to find that it had gone.

Each subsequent materialisation always seemed to be perfectly synchronised with another episode of humiliating violence. As her spouse staggered off to bed, the car would quietly make its appearance. She would clamber into the backseat, curl into a ball, then cry herself to sleep. When dawn finally arrived, she would find herself alone on the floor.

After she finally lashed out with an empty whisky bottle, she felt just as surprised as her husband had looked. Finishing him off with a poker seemed to be the only appropriate manoeuvre. As she turned her head, surveying the bloody carnage, the vehicle was suddenly there, boot open wide like a gaping mouth. Stuffing him inside proved difficult, but not entirely impossible. When she slipped behind the steering wheel, she knew that the key would be in the ignition. As the engine roared into life, the faint beginnings of a smile appeared upon her swollen lips; the impossible road stretching out before her promising a way out of hell and straight into heaven.