I’ve often written about the filthy state of my car. It is a nondescript Hyundai station wagon that gets trashed by three children without enough telling off (or should we say guidance) from their exhausted parents.
We had to fetch granny and granddad from the airport not long ago and my seven-year-old pointed out a problem.
“They can’t sit in the car,” she said. “We have to clean the food off the seats. That’s why.”
Good point.
We got the vacuum cleaner to suck up the weeks-old bread crusts, candies, cookies and French fries along with the dirt and sand. We picked up the candy wrappers, water bottles, apple juice boxes and coffee cups. Even a half-eaten McDonald’s hamburger. We filled a bag with toys and put them in their place in the house. We polished the dashboard and wiped the fingerprints off the windows. The car had been too long without a bath – and too long a moveable feast for ants, roaches and who knows what else.
Yet it is this filth that is fodder for stories to write and tell.
Ask my children in the months between the car’s washes. They see things, they hear things. They hold their noses and pull their legs up and jump out when the car stops.
I write down what they tell me.
And now you can read an extremely short tale about it, an extremely short and published tale about it.
I will highlight the key word again: published.
You can check it out on Trapeze Magazine.
It’s short but it’s a start in my effort to get my fiction published.
Now it’s time to get out the vacuum cleaner and the hose and find a net to catch any fleeing critters from my faithfully filthy car. Or, shall we say, my filthily faithful car.
