Agitation

Agitation,    by D. Avery

“Okay, I really need some cream. I can’t believe I didn’t get enough the last time shopping and now I’m right in the middle of five different baking projects. Take the car but take it easy.”

They lived rural, but not so rural that there was a cow around. They lived on a back road, but not so far back that a trip to town and the store was really anything more than an inconvenience, an expenditure of time and gas, but a trip that delighted the newly licensed teen, who was always looking for wheel time.

“Listen, I don’t need this cream so badly that you need to speed, so just take your time. Drive carefully!” she yelled after him as he gleefully raced out the door waving the keys overhead.

“Of course, Mom!”

He went straight to the store and because he managed to arrive in record time, he had extra time to further hone his driving skills on the return trip. No small feat of navigation, the return trip involved a network of back roads that eventually linked back to their back road. Some of these back roads were further back than others; some were quite twisty, some quite bumpy, and all were washboarded, so that going straight, even on the straightaways, was a challenge at the speeds he attained. At the four corners where the last long back road linked at long last with their back road he found there was space enough to blow some donuts. And having at last come full circle, his route finished, chore complete, he coasted though the last corner then turned quite neatly and slowly into their driveway. He parked the car expertly and precisely in its spot, walked into the house, and hung the keys on the peg.

“Where’s the cream?”

“Oh yeah.”

He returned to the car and picked the carton of cream up from the passenger’s side floor where it had somehow tumbled. He meticulously wiped the carton clean with his shirttail before parading it ceremoniously in to his mother, who opened it immediately. When she tipped the carton of cream into her mixing bowl nothing poured out. Opening the carton up wider she discovered butter.

He could not explain how the carton contained butter. Picking up the opened carton, he examined its thickened contents as well as its boldly printed label, which clearly said cream.

“Huh. Do you want me to go back to the store?”

***

This 410 word story has been revised and reworked from an earlier six sentence story. I am republishing it because it is new and improved and because I am linking it to Stevie Turner’s “Share Your Story” contest. Yikes.