I want someone else to please it, like I did. I want someone else’s worries to make the mattress reek. I carefully carried the crust until the burden of its weight shifted to the back of my truck. I crawled onto the mattress one last time, foolishly hoping for it to convince me not to take it to Goodwill.
The engine rumbled and jittered the springs and each bump in the road brought the mattress a few inches closer to the heavens. God was aware the mattress had lost its life and God was trying to pick it up. But each time God’s claw reached into my truck I sped up. My foot pounded the floor of the car, in tune with my radio.
The wind stabbed the truck, slowing it in its tracks. 95 miles per hour. Pot holes yanked on my wheels. 100 miles per hour. I had to be quick, or else the world would stop. My wife was being awarded a purple heart for her red heart and I didn’t want to miss its beats.
I saw a red silhouette blazing across my windshield. 55 miles per hour. The shape of a boy in the road. 25 miles per hour. The boy grew into a man as my truck grew nearer. 10 miles per hour. The silhouette was dressed in dirt-blue jeans, a tired hat and a smirk. 0 miles per hour.
The man put his claw on the bumper and gently caressed my car until his fingers touched the tip of my window. Black fingernails and wet forehead, a brown filthy excuse for a man. “If this be your truck, I command these feet be driven.”
I wanted to say no, I was going to be late, but something about his gray smile and black eyeballs made me want to help. His mud smothered the clean carpet and his breath spun my steering wheel in his direction. His name was Lu. I knew it was short for something, but I didn’t care. He asked me about my mattress and why I was going so fast. I blamed god.
The road pumped and my hands choked the wheel, only 90 minutes to drop off the mattress and drop off the hitchhiker. Time seemed to race my truck, I needed to be faster, and I needed to win the race. Lu told me not to throw away such a perfectly good thing, and I explained to him I wasn’t. “Donating is the same as throwing it away,” Lu grinned.
Lu kept asking about the mattress. How much it had originally cost, how much it was probably worth, how well I had kept it, how many times I had slept on it, and if he could keep it instead. A dirty mattress for a dirty man. One man’s trash is another trash’s treasure.
I didn’t want to give it to him, I wanted charity to have it. I wanted some orphan to open it up for Christmas. But Lu was very tempting. He told me I would make it on time if I let him sleep on it. His eyes followed my internal debate and finally convinced me. His black eyeballs convinced me.
The highway kept growing, I was not closer to my brown blonde beauty. Every time I asked Lu if we were closer to his destination he just laughed and changed the topic. His gray smile growing wider with every mile. He was starting to scare me. I asked him where he was headed. He told me he didn’t believe in heads. He wasn’t funny. He was starting to scare me.
Black hair, black eyeballs and black laughter. Lu turned up the radio and turned down his window. I asked him why he was so dirty. The wind shouted over his answer. I shut the world and he leaned his head back to rest and said,
“I blame god.”
My truck froze on the desert highway, Lu scorched and squashed the ground as he stepped out with my mattress.
Satan wanted my brown filthy charity more than god.
REFLECTION:
This piece was very challenging to write. We, as a class, were given a standard plot that we had to personalize. The given plot was: Character A has to donate a mattress to Goodwill before Character C gives a speech, Character B gets in Character A's way.
Personalizing such a standard plot was challenging because at first no ideas came to mind. I had to think carefully about a story that would fulfill the assignment's requirements. I loved this challenge because it taught me how to be fluid with static material.
My mindset has definitely changed a lot since this project. At first I thought creative story writing needed inspiration, but that mindset is long gone.I realized that sometimes you have a deadline that you have to meet whether you have an idea or not. This assignment helped me write a story without waiting around for an idea. Ideas will arise later on, after you commence writing.
A great skill I learned during the course and progress of this assignment was: how to just write. Sitting down, whenever, and writing about whatever is a pretty great skill. This skill was definitely taught earlier in the semester with the concept of freewriting, but I never knew how to apply those concepts to an assignment with guidelines.
Below this entire body of text are two images. These images are pictures. These two pictures are of my thought process before the story. I didn't really change the story much from the original draft because by this time I had learned to contemplate ideas before I begin writing. I asked myself questions about the story before I wrote the story because I wanted to create a hypothetical background for each character. I wanted to develop their purposes and relationships before I started the story.
HERE ARE THE OUTLINES/THOUGHT PROCESSES:
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