Good day everyone!
This week I've been having a lot of writer's block. My life has been very busy, as I'm finishing up everything I wanted to do before classes start again. This is a flash fiction story about personified die-cast cars and their lifespan. I started this story a few days ago while I was thinking about writing a series on personified objects and really struggled to finish it due to my creative block. As a writer, I feel like it's important to share the pieces I'm not the most proud of because it's a genuine representation of what writing is like. This story definitely needs improvements, but I'm just happy I was able to create something this week.
I hope you enjoy it either way.
I follow the orange track downwards, through the loop, then over the hill towards the finish line. Glancing to my right I see my buddy CR-X only a few feet behind me. I think my track is shorter because a long straight slope got lost, so whoever gets put on it wins. As we meet at the end of our tracks, our bumpers slam into the wall. Cheers from our humans erupt in a language we don’t understand.
“Wow DeVille, you’re always so much faster than me,” CR-X says, not out of jealousy but admiration.
“I’ve been doing this a lot longer, kid,” I say. “Your wheels will loosen up and spin faster in the future.”
“I sure hope I get the time,” CR-X says. “Stingray keeps telling me we’ll be going into the Box soon. It’s been around for forty years, I’m sure this has happened to it before.”
“Stingray is just a pessimist,” I reply. “A stay in the Box is never permanent.”
I should’ve listened to CR-X. I don’t know how long we’ve been in the Box, but it’s been way too long since I’ve run my squeaking wheels down the track. CR-X looks so dejected, sitting there only having been played with for a few years. Stingray thinks the humans will sell it for good money soon. It keeps talking about being put in display cases next to so-called red line cars. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds like a great way to collect dust. At least the Box protects us from dust. I like talking to CR-X since it has so many great ideas for what could happen to us in the future.
“Maybe someone will play with us again,” it says.
“I can only hope so,” I say, imagining the days when we got to race.
I miss those days, and the pictures in my head of the orange tracks are so vivid I can almost feel them under my tires. I can only hope that someday, I’ll be driving once more.
The lid to the Box opens after a long period of movement. It opens to the face of a small human smiling down on us. It reaches its long claws towards me and lifts me into the air. Another claw grabs CR-X and places us both on bright orange tracks. The tracks are newer than I remember, yet I still go speeding down them just the same. My wheels now squeak, and there seems to be a big human with the smaller one.
“Do you think this human is the same one who used to play with us?” CR-X asks, screaming towards me from the other track.
“I hope so! I want to be played with for generations to come,” I scream in return.
My front bumper soon slams into the end of the track, just as it did years ago. I once again feel the same rush as I did back then, my life feeling complete once again.
My goal is to post once every 1-2 weeks during my college semester. Please keep an eye out for new posts, I can't wait to share my writing with my readers again.
Have a wonderful week,
-Rosetta
Image by Nobiur Rahman
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