Wind whips down the slip-road that leads from the Lydiate Ash roundabout onto the M5. Her mouth is dry, though she has just sipped from a water bottle. She huddles inside the raincoat, shuffles her boots on the gravel, re-arranges her face into a half-smile half-scowl that she hopes will give her the impression of being friendly and tough. She does not feel tough. Only her boots are tough, with their thick soles, the black leather cracked like dried mud.
She sticks out her right arm, her thumb.
A banana lorry pulls up almost immediately. It’s a long step up into the cab - her first time inside a truck.
‘Where are you going?’ The driver seems trustworthy but like her face both may be a lie.
‘Bristol.’ She’s hitched before but never alone. Once, with a friend, a man said if he could kiss one of them he’d take them further. She said no, yet the friend seemed to think she’d acquiesced. She hadn’t. An argument followed. They got out of the car.
The driver offers her a banana. She expects a crude joke. None arrives.
She doesn’t need to hitch - her mother gave her the money for the coach fare - so why is she doing this? All she knows is that she loves being out here on the road, the recklessness of it. The fact that there’s a boyfriend at the end of the motorway is, for now, of little importance. What she wants is to be up here in the cab, watching the white lines disappearing into the distance, the autumn leaves a blur of rusts, ochres and greens. She wants to be in this cab forever, as the tyres rumble down the asphalt and the diesel fumes belch out into the crystalline air.
Bronwen Griffiths writes flash fiction and longer form fiction. Her work has been published in the UK, USA and New Zealand. She won the Mslexia Flash Fiction competition in 2024.
'Hitching Down the M5' was first published in the Worcester Flash Fiction Anthology in 2020.
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