One Sweet Ride

Teds-Car-in-the-Woods

PHOTO PROMPT © Ted Strutz

Larry hurt all over. He was too old to be tramping through the woods.

His legs felt as wooden as his cane. He’d fall without the support and even if he didn’t break a hip, he might not be able to get back up.

“Made it,” he croaked.

He had no idea how the remains of the ’48 Dodge Sedan had gotten out here. He did know the first time he sat behind the driver’s seat decades ago, it took him back to the days of his youth.

He didn’t want to die in the insanity of the world today.

It’s Wednesday and time again to participate in Rochelle Wisoff-Fields 5 September 2025 edition of Friday Fictioneers. The idea is to use the image at the top as a prompt to craft a poem or short story no more than 100 words long. My word count is exactly 100.

I know that nostalgia is highly overrated and that the “good old days” had their share of problems and woes. But especially for some of us older folks (I’m not as old as Larry), just reading the news can make the world seem a whole lot crazier than it was even twenty or thirty years ago.

For Larry, the post-war era of 1948 might be his Heaven and 2025 his Hell. You never know.

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit inlinkz.

The anthology Drabbles: Second Wave published by Starry Eyed Press is not available in paperback and Kindle formats. It features ten of my wee stories (the maximum amount allowed for a contributor) about what happens next AFTER first contact with aliens.

Find it at Amazon.

33 thoughts on “One Sweet Ride”

  3. James, realizing it is a time machine and he has a choice to leave the now gives me goosebumps. If only! I’m not sure where I’d go, but I like the idea of getting out of Dodge for awhile.

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    • I guess it’s a matter of perspective. I’d go with experiencing “craziness” over the last ten to maybe fifteen years or so. I know there’s tendency to focus on COVID (the government’s restrictions as the result), Trump, or both, but there’s a lot of other stuff that doesn’t make sense once you set aside the idea that there’s a political party or social movement that is going to save us. Nostalgia covers up the craziness of the times we want to go back to (remember gas rationing in the early 1970s?) but those were the evils we knew and could understand. Maybe it’s been this bad all along.

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