Now that I’ve finished the A-Z Challenge, I’m on to the Story-A-Day May Challenge. Here’s my first piece of fiction for the month. It is largely unedited, so please be kind.
Lorene stood at the dining room table, a ball peen hammer in her hand. It wasn’t the right tool for the job, but sometime a girl just has to work with what she has.
Jesse usually kept this hammer in the garage, on the table next to the Corvette he was working on. She guessed it had something to do with flattening out the dents in the metal but she never spent any time out there when he was working so she only heard the noises he made. He poured so much of himself into that car, he didn’t have time for anything else. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. He seemed to have made time for Shelly.
Lorene wouldn’t have thought that Shelly was his type. She was a bookish sort of girl, given to wearing skirts and sweaters and giggling behind her hand. Jesse usually went for a tougher type, a bit like Lorene herself, jeans, leather jackets and attitude.
The thing is, if you hook up with someone with attitude, you have to expect some push back if you start treating them badly. And he had been very, very bad lately. He was ignoring Lorene’s calls, he didn’t come home until very late and he didn’t slide in close to her in bed anymore. She had known something was up and then the breathy phone call from Shelly had confirmed it.
Once she hung up the phone, she had gone to shelf in their dining room and taken down his precious collection of collectible glasses. He had The Beatles, Elvis, The Stones and a bunch of old bands that she didn’t recognize, she took each one and put it in a line along the table edge.
The hammer might not have been the best tool for the job but it smashed the glasses just fine and she started walking through the house looking for more things to smash. The glass front of the stereo cabinet went shattered with one blow, shards of tinted glass raining on the carpet. The mirrored front of their closet door splintered but didn’t fall apart.
The door to the garage accepted a nice dent but didn’t break, it just swung open to reveal Jesse standing there by the Corvette. The expression on his face was at once puzzled and dumb – in the movie of their lives, the costume designer would have dressed him like a yokel for this scene, just to highlight the look on his face. He wasn’t dressed like a yokel though, no suspenders, no tank top, no weather beaten hat, instead, he was there in his jeans and his Imagine Dragons tshirt, his mouth hanging open like he was waiting for the dentist to give him the all clear.
“What are you doing with that hammer, Lorene?”
“I’m smashing things, Jesse. I think it’s best if you get out of my way.”
It might have been the hammer or maybe it was the look in her eyes, but either way, he stepped to the side giving her access to the Corvette. He looked pained at the thought that she was going to take the hammer to it, but he didn’t stop her.
She raised the hammer overhead in two hands but thought better of it. Instead, she opened the door and slid behind the wheel. She gave him the nod and he scrabbled on the table behind him for the garage door opener. He raised it and she slowly backed out and drove away.
She also kept the hammer.