Spare Tire
Even after he had wrestled the truck to a stop by the side of the road, the sound of the tire popping seemed to echo off the desert hills. Or maybe the damn thing hadn't just popped; maybe it had altogether exploded. Sure sounded like it.
He sat there for a few moments, hands still on the wheel, listening to the silence roll back in to fill the space left by the truck's silenced engine. He'd thought about replacing that tire at the last gas station, but had been stymied by the simple fact that the attendant there hadn't spoken a word of English. You got that sometimes, out here in the desert; what language a guy spoke wasn't as important as whether he could be trusted to actually show up to a post halfway between Somewhere and Nowhere.
Of course, it meant that he'd been forced to continue on his trip on three tires and a donut. And from the sound of it, the donut had just blown.
His eyes went to the cellphone on his dashboard, but he knew there would be point in even trying it. There just wasn't any coverage out here. His son had tried to explain it once, how the craggy hills blocked out the signals, but all he knew from his many trips across the desert was that there was a large swatch where cellphones simply didn't work.
"Well then," he said to the silence, and lowered his hands to his lap. He was thirty miles from anywhere, in the desert, with a flat tire, and with night coming on.
He was also edging toward sixty years old, and too damn tired by far to even want to think about this predicament.
"Well, then. What now?"
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