Prompt (Image): The Long Road
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“Come on!” my sister yelled. “Let’s go!”
“Just a minute!” I yelled back. I stood on the edge of the broken highway, staring into the distance, hand over my brow to shield the glaring sun. The mountains were so beautiful, I couldn’t help but linger. Their blue silhouettes lined the horizon like the edge of the world, with the long road ahead visible for miles and miles. The city wasn’t too far away, I thought. We could probably make it there by sundown if we kept a good pace.
We had only been walking for a few days, but it felt like weeks. Grandma had been ill, and Father had gone to the city for medicine. He hadn’t been back for a month. Then the rains came. I’d never seen them this bad. It started to flood, first our fields, then our house. We kept dry enough in the attic, and scavenged as much food as we could before it all spoiled. My sister and I tried to help Grandma, but she was too weak to survive without the medicine. She passed away just as the flood subsided. We buried her in the backyard. We had started getting used to surviving on our own without Father, but we had no reason to stay at the farm. Our neighbor barely had enough food to survive on his own, and had no way to take us in. So we told him we planned to leave town, in case Father came back and wondered where we were.
As we traveled, we discovered just how bad the flooding had been. Major roads like this one had fallen apart, and no one had been out to fix them. It was like a wasteland. It felt like the end of the world, and we were the only survivors.
I hoped we’d find Father in the city. Our only clue was a shop he told us about, where he said he’d go for the medicine. What had happened to him? Had he gotten hurt? Had he lied to us and abandoned us? I know he’d been grieving ever since mom died, but that was a few years ago now. We both longed to know where he was.
“Sis, come on!” she whined. She started walking back towards me, frowning.
“Alright, I’m coming.” I sat down, dangling my legs over the side of the highway, a good six or seven feet between me and the road below. I braced myself and jumped, landing on my feet safely.
“What were you looking at?” she asked.
“I think we can make it to the city by sundown.” She raised her eyebrows, as if she knew that wasn’t what I was thinking about. I sighed. “And, I miss Father. He would have stood up there, looking at the mountains like that too. Remember when he took us on walks in the forest near the farm, and spent way too long looking at the mountains when we got to the cliffs?”
“Yeah. I miss him too.”
I hugged her, overcome with gratitude that I still had her to hang on to. I felt tears in the corners of my eyes.
She pulled away and looked at me. “It’ll be alright. We’ll get there, we’ll find him.”
I nodded, letting myself believe her words, despite knowing in the back of my mind that they were a lie. A lie she wanted to believe too.
We walked down the road, hand in hand, hoping against hope we’d see Father again.