Exhale
Flash Fiction - a piece that came from a Judy Reeves writing prompt in "A Writers' Book of Days" thelivelymuse.substack.com
Her breath coming in choked gasps, she looked through the bug-spattered, dust-veiled windscreen of the rusty car. It was stationary now. She had been driving blindly, almost literally so, through the side-tracks of the parched farmland until she came to the outcropping, the ledge of the quarry where she was sure the imprints of her feet, her very soul, must sit in the hard cracked earth, so many times had she stood right here. It wasn’t only the dirt of the windscreen on the ancient and battered landrover that was clouding her sight - the tears burning her eyes refused to acquiesce to the violence of her contracted fists.
It was almost night. She had, moments before, escaped the farmhouse in whose bedroom she took her first breath. The snatched key cutting into her hand, she had stumbled across the yard, the buildings behind her drenched in the dying glow of late August. But she knew well enough that inside those walls lived the bone-deep chill of terror, regardless of the season or weather.
A cold air began creeping around her as her glazed eyes watched the sun drop below the horizon, leaving only a trail, a whisper, of its former glory. Setting hard inside her was the dark intention born of the final eruption of agony and rage, the wrenching out of her guts, when she accepted at last that he had no intention of ever letting her go.
That morning, so so long ago now, a spacious landscape had stretched ahead of her, through her, when her hands had shakily unsealed and smoothed out the Exam Board letter. All that long summer day whilst he was out on the farm, she had convinced herself that it would all be ok now that she had external validation of her worth and a place at a University as far away from here as she could manage. Now she could get out of this cage, where any memories of her mother before her fatal accident were overwritten by the horrors of the days, and the nights, with her drunken father.
This, surely, would now catapult her, somehow, from the insidious daily terror of her young life. She recalled that golden letter being eaten by his dirty cigarette in the ashtray, black edges chasing the insatiable flame, just as the night now swallowed the sun.
She let the handbrake off, feeling the idling engine respond to the gentle, incisive pressure of her barefoot on the metal of the pedal as she exhaled, her breath calm now. Consent, at long last, rushed through her tired and shaking body. Breathing in deeply as her foot came off the peddle, she finally felt her edges, filled her form, knew where she ended and began. The eternal sun at the centre of her being glowed at last with an extinction burst that radiated out through the bars of her scarred skin. Her foot pressed one final time on the cold accelerator. Exhale.
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You can read Judy Reeves on Substack at
And the book, which I highly recommend, can be purchased here.