#FridayFlash: “Flat Tyre”

Morning. Another week, another story, not much preamble here. If you have ten minutes to read and/or vote for Hobson & Choi, you win my love.

Anyway, on with this week’s story. As ever, plenty of other good flash work available on the FridayFlash site.

Flat Tyre

The way I tried to explain it to Lucy was this: it’s not that I don’t want to come to your birthday party, I just can’t. I’m not lazy, I simply can’t move.

If you think about it in terms of cars, and why wouldn’t you, I haven’t run out of petrol or had some vague breakdown, it’s more like I’ve got a flat tyre, maybe? Like my body simply isn’t equipped to travel – I’d love to come see you on your special day and give you a hug and a card, which I guess I’d have to pick up on the way, but I’m simply not up to it.

My feet won’t move, the bus stop is too far away, my tyre isn’t just deflated, but the wheel’s fallen off, and I dunno what’s happened to the spare, I suppose someone stole it. Maybe smashed the windscreen in too, so not only can I not start the engine, but if I tried to pull away, the police would nail me.

See, it’s not just that it’s broken, it would be irresponsible. Like, my senses are so shattered, if I tried to go to Lucy’s party, I might trip over and knock people into the road. Not just myself, but someone else. It might even be a baby.

And I was meant to be bringing my three housemates too, which would make it doubly foolish, since if they came, they’d be caught up.

Collateral damage. The airbag might save me, but they’d be thrown through the window into the road, because we don’t all have our seatbelts on, you see.

And in this case, the seatbelts are sobriety, the windscreen is the railway bridge near my house and the airbag is… I dunno, friendship or something?

I can’t actually drive, so I wasn’t sure. Anyway, so I phoned Lucy up and told her all of this, right, even managed to rev up a little sob, and all of a sudden, she drove right round to my house and punched me in the face. My housemate even let her in to do it.

I mean, women, right? That kind of attitude could cause a twelve-car pileup.