Luck and the Truck – Day Four of the 10 Days of Flash Challenge

I’m participating in Leone Ross’ wonderful 10 days of Flash challenge on Facebook. She sets a new, quite difficult challenge each day.

Today’s challenge was to take a single event, but vary the setting, the characters, the POV and the tone five ways. Unfortunately, my inability to follow instructions properly is at play, and I wrote six.

Luck & the Truck

1. 

The taxi’s air-conditioning gasps out a tepid breeze and the stink of fertile rot.  The world outside the car, on Monivong Boulevard, is under water.  Rain has turned the daylight green and murky and brought the traffic to a standstill.  A woman in the back seat watches through the downpour as a group of drenched and bare-chested boys pull an old man out of the cab of a tumbledown truck.  He flails and shouts but the rain hammering the roof of the taxi and the protests of the air conditioner drown out his cries.  The young men pull him to the rubbish strewn sidewalk and begin to beat him with thick wooden sticks until he collapses to his knees, then onto his side, and curls up under the blows. The water rivering down the windscreen makes a surreal soup of the brutality. Green and grey watercoloured violence. The woman in the taxi has never seen this kind of violence before, but she is sure, when the old man has stopped moving, stopped trying to crawl away, and given up trying to cover his head with his arms, that he’s dead.

2.

Four orders of noodle soup and three iced green teas.  The thin plastic wrap covering her food tray flaps open in the wind that blows up with the downpour.  Once she’s done with this last delivery, she can go home, curl back up on the pile of soft purple fabric, and go back to her dream of being a beautiful princess in a Korean soap opera. Halfway across the road, Socheata stops and fumbles to re-cover the food, trying to keep the rain out of the bowls of soup. Princesses, she thinks, don’t have to do this sort of stuff.

3.

The mangoes are bad this year. The rains have come too soon. They’re watery and sour.  The plump woman at the roadside fruit stall gnaws on a hangnail, looks down at the produce in front of her, and reorders the neat pyramid of oblong fruits, perching the rosiest ones on the top.  When the rain starts, she sighs, sits back, and cools herself with her ragged paper hand fan. There’ll be no customers until this is over, the fruit seller thinks. Her stomach grumbles. Bicycle riders take shelter under the eaves of crumbling nearby buildings. Passing cars plow through puddles, throwing up sprays of gutter water.  The screech and slew of rubber on wet road makes her look up just in time to watch her lunch and the delivery girl disappear under the grill of a truck.

4. 

Mrs. Seng curses softly as the needle in her machine jams and snaps on the zipper she’s trying to sew into a skirt.  Next door, at the noodle shop, Mrs. Keo calls over, but Socheata has fallen asleep in the noonday heat on a pile of fabric on the floor.

“Wake up, flower,” Mrs. Seng calls to her daughter.  “It’s almost lunch time.”

The girl stirs and blinks up at her mother.  “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“School costs money, love. Go on. If you hurry, you can be finished in an hour. Then we’ll have some tea and pork buns.”

4. (Again, because I can’t count to five, apparently)

Mr. Lim had painted sutras in silver on the roof of the cab. He had hung a soapstone Buddha off the rear view mirror.  He even taken to buying a fresh jasmine string every morning, and twining it around the Buddha pendant, but nothing really helped. Sometimes the truck started, and sometimes it didn’t. That was the way of things. Like his hip that felt fine some days and locked up on others.  They were both old.  He’d pulled the metal Peugeot emblem off the grill, and forced himself to forget all the French he knew.  The trick had worked. They’d both survived the dark times. So, if he walked with a limp on occasion, and the old truck whimpered and refused to turn over from time to time, it was only to be expected.

But this morning Mr. Lim felt no pain and the truck started on the first try. They were headed out of Phnom Penh, to a depot on the outside of town, to pick up a load of durian when the rain began.  He swore and flicked the switch to turn on the windshield wipers, but nothing happened. He tried again, back and forth, not fast, but coaxingly.

“Come on, you old bitch. Stop being so cranky.” But the truck was feeling stubborn.

The dark little figure ahead of him was there as he looked up. Mr. Lim stomped on the brake so hard he was sure his foot would plunge through the floorboard. He felt the tires grab, then slide, then grab again. But it was too late.

5.

Keo leans forward on the cafe’s green plastic stool and plunges the long-handled spoon into his iced coffee repeatedly.  The heat is making his bad temper worse.  Four days and no work. His friends, Saron and Toto are in the same boat. This morning, like every other morning, they turned up at the labour exchange too late. Boys who’d got there sooner had snapped up the day’s construction work. They sip coffees, share cigarettes and bitch about their bad luck as the heat swells and the sweat trickles down their bare, brown backs.

He’s ashamed he can’t bring home some money to his mother. Even his little sister, Socheata, earns something.  And, as if to compound his shame, he spots her, hurrying down the other side of Monivong Boulevard, with a tray of food perched on her shoulder.  Brownnosing little bitch, he thinks.  So good at school, his mother’s little pet. As if it’s going to make any difference. She’ll probably grow up to be a whore.

He follows her lithe little figure as the rain begins, watching it soak her long, black hair as she steps into the road.