Wednesday Morning Writing Exercise

I began writing at 6:00 a.m. today. I began with a name, Mary Ellen, and had no idea where this piece would take me, but here it is. It could be the beginning of a novel, I suppose.

Mary Ellen wasn’t a little girl any more. She was thirteen, a teenager now, and she understood, perhaps more than most people, that life was not always easy. Growing up with Maude, her grandmother, had not been ideal, but Mary Ellen had been dealt that card only one day after she was born. Her mother, Sara, only sixteen at the time, had plopped her infant, baby girl into a broken bassinette and had left her on Maude’s porch. She fortunately had knocked on the door first, before turning from the child and rushing to the dented, pick-up truck driven by Denny, a buck-toothed, backward boy, who at seventeen had no clue he was the father.

“Just take me away, Denny,” Sara had begged him. “Quick.”

And he had. The two adolescents drove on a two-lane, winding road for miles through the Indiana countryside until the pick-up’s engine sputtered and quit. Just like that.

“What now?” Sara whined. “How are you going to fix this mess, Denny?”

“Reckon I’ll walk for a spell. Must be a town up yonder,” Denny said. “You wait here,” he added, wiping beads of perspiration from his face with a dirty handkerchief. “Don’t want you leaving my pick-up.”

He slammed the door of the truck forcefully and began trudging up the road. Sara, consumed by her own misgivings, and oblivious to Denny’s, watched him go. When he was a speck, he rounded a curve and was gone.

Sara gathered the mass of long curls that hung down her back into a ponytail, knotted it into a bun, and sighed. “Guess, I’m stuck,” she muttered.

After several hours of waiting, the warmth of the day lulled her to sleep; when she awoke it was dusk, and Denny had not returned. The fact was, he never did.

At daybreak, after a sleepless night in the front seat of the pick-up, Sara set off herself. “Can’t believe he just abandoned me,” she grumbled, angrily. Her words accompanied her, like a sad song for miles until her pace slowed and she sat, hungry, tired, and alone on the side of the road. Too weary to move, she waited and wondered, somewhat stupidly how she had arrived here, at this place, in the middle of nowhere.