Annette felt that salads were entirely too much work.

It was bad enough when she was young and a salad was just iceberg lettuce and tomato with some bits of apple and cheese. Maybe some green pepper if things were getting fancy. Back then, you could pick all of those things up at the supermarket and be done with it.

Now, you had to go to the farm or the farmer’s market for some things and to the supermarket for others, and you had to have certain types of greens and crumbly cheese. You had to consider colours and how to cut the vegetables so they would look the best. Everything had to be organic or made by artisans. It was a big political statement and she didn’t even know where to begin.

Ms. Delaney’s administrative assistant had assigned specific foods to each person, and Annette knew that Jean would be carefully inspecting what arrived at the luncheon. She would probably be comparing it to a master list to see if it met her criteria. Most of it would probably fall far short.

If Annette had been left to her own devices, she would have brought bread to their get-together. Or, better yet, she would have convinced them to order something in. It was a bit too much like a neighbourhood party, this potluck foolishness. It would have been far better to have had something delivered, no political statements, no stress on the employees, no running around from place to place to source locally grown tomatoes. The mere idea that she had to ‘source’ food for a party was making her stomach turn over.

She couldn’t risk doing anything else though. She had to seem like a team player, like a ‘company woman’, she had to play along. Every day at Associated Insurance felt like a delicate balance and all it would take was one bad decision, one poor choice to tip her over into the unemployment line. When she thought about it, she wasn’t even sure that they still had unemployment lines, but there was still such a thing as getting fired and she wasn’t going to risk it.

That’s why she hated having to make a salad, too much risk. There was too much choosing, too much of a margin for error. There were too many ways for Jean to decide that Annette had fallen short. It might be the peppers, it might be the blue cheese, it might be that the carrot was grated too finely or that it had been grated it at all. Annette didn’t know what the salad trends were right now and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to know.

Why couldn’t she have been asked to bring the bread? Sure the choices would have been endless, but she could have just headed to the bakery and bought the fanciest looking one. As long as it was expensive, Jean wouldn’t have had anything to say about it, and Annette would have been off the hook.

She was firmly on the hook though, choosing different sized knives for different tasks, deciding which of her bowls looked the prettiest, triple rinsing the escarole. She was making this salad like her job depended on it because, for all she knew, it did.

I have passed her every day since January, she sits at the bus stop at the corner of Ruth and Michener. She wears a yellow coat and a greenish sort of scarf with a black hat. I always want to stop and see if she’s headed my way, maybe give her a ride so she doesn’t have to wait in the cold. I never do though.

You can’t just offer someone a ride in this day and age. They are bound to think that you are up to no good and I just don’t need that hassle. I know that sounds like an excuse not to help someone but I’ve been that girl on the bus stop and it’s kind of creepy when someone stops and offers you a ride. You know that they aren’t likely to be a serial killer or anything but you can’t quite shake that fear that they might be. You don’t want to be the stupid girl who got into a car with a stranger. Sure, it’s a bit different because we’re both women, but you never know, an awful lot of bad guys have turned out to be bad girls instead.

And that doesn’t even consider the risk to me, maybe she’s one of the bad girls and she’s just waiting her chance to take advantage of someone’s good nature. I don’t want to be that fool who picked up someone she didn’t even know and then ended up stranded in the middle of nowhere as the stranger drove off in her car. I know there are worse scenarios to paint, but let’s not even go there. I can’t even bear the thought of it.

I keep an eye our for her though, every day, as I go by. She always looks well. She’s been getting through her novel quickly. She always seems to have a snack. I probably don’t have to worry about her. She’s probably perfectly happy taking the bus. It’s not so bad, you know, the bus. You can just sit there and read while you get chauffeured to your destination. It beats driving a car – you can’t read and drive.

I wonder if she notices me, driving by every day. Does think of me as the woman in the blue Kia? Does she notice what I’m wearing, whether I have a snack? Is she wondering why I don’t stop and offer her a ride? Does it seem weird to her if I don’t drive by on a given day? Does it throw off her routine?

It’s on my mind, see, because this is two mornings in a row that she hasn’t been there. I didn’t think too much of it yesterday – everyone misses the occasional day at work or school – but two days in a row is pretty rare. I spent all day yesterday wondering about her, and I just caught myself thinking about her again as I made my tea during my break. I wonder if someone else decided to stop and pick her up? I probably don’t need to worry about her, right?

Today’s story a day prompt was to write a story in 604 words. I did it!

She stood at the side of the highway. The wind was whipping her hair into her face and sending her knee length coat flying out behind her like a cape. Rain was falling all around, but her eyes were afire, power dancing across her outstretched palms. She roared her fury and the sound cut through the wind and the rain and echoed off the rocks on either side of the road.
***

She had left home in sunshine, angling the Mazda through traffic as she made her way to the highway. She was a woman on a mission and that mission was to collect her mother from her quilting retreat on the Salmonier Line. It was a straightforward task and she had left in plenty of time, so there was nothing between her and her Mom but highway. She pressed her foot to the gas and bellowed along to the radio.

At first she thought that something had been spilled on the road ahead of her- a perfect circle of oil or paint that had somehow tumbled out of a truck and had splashed on the pavement. She slowed down in case it was slick, she didn’t want to hit something slippery at 100kms per hour.

Her caution saved her. This was no circle of paint in the road, it was a crater, a dent in the pavement deep enough to be filled with shadows. If she had hit that at her top speed…she shuddered to think of what would have happened. She pulled over onto the shoulder a little ways before the crater and put on her hazard lights. Hopefully, that would at least make people slow down a little as they approached.

Once she was safely parked, she called the police and then assured them that she would wait for them to arrive. She was probably going to be late for her mission, but hopefully her Mom was trying to quilt until the very last minute and wouldn’t notice. She didn’t want to send a text that would worry her mother.

She settled in to wait for the police, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror for any incoming traffic. When the mini-van came around the corner, she panicked at first and then calmed as the driver pulled in behind her. It was just starting to rain, so she grabbed her coat from the seat next to her and put it on as she got out to explain the situation to the other driver. She was almost back to the van when she heard the roar behind her, she looked into the other vehicle to see a woman so terrified that her face was all eyes and open mouth, her hand reaching towards the baby in the seat behind her.

She stopped walking towards the vehicle and turned on her heel to face the threat. A dragon was lumbering up the road towards her, flames spewing from its mouth. When she talked about it afterward, she wasn’t sure what made her try it but, given the presence of a dragon, magic seemed to be the order of the day.

Instead of running like a sensible person, she merely held her hands out in front of her and shouted ‘BEGONE.’ A sort of electrical charge shot from her palms and the dragon backed away. She shouted again, and he retreated further. She continued to walk forwards, driving the dragon further way from the woman and her baby. He was going to have to get through her and whatever the hell she was channelling through her hands before he got to that van.

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.