So I took this class (writing for magazines) because I like (sometimes) to write and I thought a new style might be interesting. I was right about that. Love the class. It’s a real “how to.” The teacher is great, providing practical instruction backed by a whole lot of personal experience.

Here’s the first little assignment. We had to submit a description of something – a place or event and not use the word “I”. Bad me, I procrastinated and then had to write it in the hour before class. Hence, I picked something from my own history because I am fundamentally not a fiction writer. Nevertheless, this was fun. I got to make me into something I’m not and not feel bad about it.

Edna hummed tunelessly as she came up to the final bend before the long straightaway. Around the curve a crow at the edge of the road pecked at a flattened house cat, the orange hair still visible on parts of the tail, but its face gone all these days into its death. “Get now” Edna told the crow. “Get” as she slowed coming up onto the crow, “get” until the bird let go its meal and hopped out of the path of the car. She sped up a bit then, the long road, narrow between the pocket farms with their geese and gardens; a road usually empty of other people but this time not. A white four door, venerable, slightly dusty but unmarked, with good paint and good tires. Edna slowed again, and looked for the white peacocks that were usually strutting this time of the day at the blue farm. Not there, Edna sighed and with one hand straightened her box of tissues that had slipped from its place on the shelf below the dash. She glanced up for the white car, just ahead now, and slowed even more. She picked at a piece of dust on the shelf made visible by the now properly square tissue box. Her eyes moved back to the white car; her hands clutched at the wheel as she braked. The car, so close now she could see the streaks in the young men’s hair, Edna slowed to a crawl to stop from hitting them. She saw the driver turn to grin at the passenger.

The heat of the car, now that she was moving so slowly, bloomed. She undid the button at her throat, dropped her speed until she had enough room to move around the car and pulled into the oncoming lane to pass. The young man stepped on the gas to keep up with her. Edna’s head snapped up as she turned to look at them; she saw the driver’s blonde head turn and the passenger’s wide grin turn into an open mouthed laugh. She slid the car back behind them. The white car slowed again. Crawling, Edna’s face flushed.

From the little wetland she passed a red-winged blackbird flashed and the deep mud smell of the rushes flowed up into the air tumbled by the wings’ passage. Edna hardly noticed, her eyes merely twitched toward the bird now vanished back into the reeds at the back of the wet. She pulled back again, giving her self room to pass and when she tried to move ahead, again the boys pulled in front of her. Their mother’s car, she thought, as she yanked her steering wheel and aimed her car right for the driver.

The grin froze and later, Edna remembered herself laughing that rather unbecoming snort like thing she sometimes did. The boy yanked his wheel too, but unlike Edna, he was close enough to the edge of the road that in order to avoid her, the edge of his passenger-side tire went too far and caught in the ploughed dirt. The car tipped, the wheel jerked from his hands and the boys went over the edge, off the road, the car bumping, sliding sideways into the fallow field, brown dirt billowing in waves around them, as if they had hit a patch of black ice and landed in a half frozen muddy lake.

Edna relaxed her grip on the wheel, undid another button to cool down, and then sped up.