Lesson One: A Stranger Comes to Town

She couldn’t tell a Ford from a Dodge but if there was one thing that she did know, it was that she was in big trouble. Huge trouble. And with her wrists and ankles bound tight with duct tape, blindfolded and gagged, there was nothing much she could do but allow her face to slap the floor of the truck bed over each dip and curve of the road, her shoulders and chest indented by the grained flooring, her body rolling each way with the turns and stops of the vehicle.

Overheard the warm night beckons her nervous sweat from her pores, reminding her that at least for another turn, another acceleration that she is still alive.

She has seen kidnappings happen in movies. The victim recounts the story later after escaping and leading her saviors back to the culprits, having memorized every direction they was taken even when blind folded. But even when she tenses her muscles and pulls her wrists apart with all of her might all she manages to do create a headache from all of the tension. Her bounds do not budge. She cannot chew through the layers of tape wrapped over her mouth and around her head. And her ankles are already numb from the lack of circulation.

The only thing she can tell about her whereabouts are that they are no longer in her small sleepy farm town. The air smells different. The wind feel strange. The dirt ridden roads she is use to have been replaced with smooth pavement that gives barely a bump if not for road kill.

She is far from home and could bet her life that she will never see it again.

Lesson Two: Let’s Go on an Adventure

Her name is Aurore. It means Dawn in French. There is no story as to why her mother, who hails from the same small farm town that she was born in, decided that name. France never appealed to anyone where she comes from, only land, produce, animals and profit.

But there has to be a story as to why she was snatched on her walk home from finishing her shift at the boutique. She heard the engine of the truck from in the distance but didn’t recognize the egg blue of the exterior or the frame of the two men in the front seat. She remembers turning back forward to measure the familiar distance between the crooked fields she was walking besides to the entrance of her farm’s driveway. But she was caught off guard by the impact of something hitting her in the back of the head, the screeching of the truck’s brakes, the sun warmed dust on the side of her face when she hit the ground, the soft darkness that danced around the edges of her eyes until swallowing her whole.

The truck braking hard wakes her from her thoughts and without warning, she rolls and rolls until she slams into the tailgate, the pressure unhinging the door. She feels like she’s falling forever until she hits the warm concrete.

There is blood. Small speckles that from her vantage point, become pools the closer to the front of the truck.

She tastes it on the back of her tongue.

She smells it in the air as the concrete turns to grass and her feet carry her from the street through the thicket bordering the side of the road.

She can still taste the dirt.

Lesson Three: Another Stranger Comes to Town

Bounded and still captive, even if only to herself, she feels as she has found herself while being lost among these trees in a place she's never been, and doesn't want to go back home.

#makeourmark

Sholonda Higgins

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