Alison Wells Author

I fancied trying to keep within a 500 word limit. It’s late in the day and this is a bit of a riff but anyhow…

On the hard shoulder she gave me the cold shoulder as we sat anxious and rattled. I’d had bangers and mash in the motorway diner, she’d had a platter of chips. It hadn’t been my idea to drive the guts out of the old banger. She wouldn’t even tell me where we were going. ‘Out,’ she said. ‘Out. That’s it, stop the questions.’ Now she had a chip on her shoulder. I hadn’t checked the oil. And now I was in the deep fat fryer. It wasn’t a typical kind of breakdown. Or maybe it was. One of those where you think everything’s okay and suddenly it happens. Now we were waiting for roadside assistance. We’d rolled to a stop right beside one of those motorway phones and now we were going to find out the truth. Did they really connect to anyone? Was there really life on Mars?

I might as well tell you her name. Well maybe not. What if my current wife finds this? Look what I wanted to say was that I didn’t care really. No, I don’t mean I didn’t care. I mean we were stranded with only a Mars bar and at that moment I knew that there wasn’t anyone in the world I’d rather be stranded with and there never would be. And being stranded, stuck there was the best thing that could have happened and although I wished I hadn’t eaten so many sausages earlier and the Articulated lorries were too close, much too close, I’d really hoped that there’d be no-one on the other end of that phone and that the batteries would be dead on our mobiles and that we would have to sit there on the cold, I mean hard shoulder together for a long, long time. But the assistance came in record time and after they towed us to the nearest town, she broke down and ended it. I never found out where we’d been going.