We flew past men guiding their teams through furrowed fields. Women gathered laundry from lines strung from porches to trees. Barefoot children chased chickens—part labor, part joy. My passenger, Elijah, squinted into the blur, as if trying to force the barns to hold still. Cars made his world spin at the wrong speed.
Horses and buggies tether my Amish neighbors to what matters to them. Still, they’ll ride in a car when a buggy won’t do. Someone ‘English’ has to take the wheel, and I’d become a substitute for a horse.
When we rolled over Peacedale Bridge, Elijah spoke his first words since his soft “Hallo.” He kept much to himself.
“Horse dangled over da bridge ‘till morning,” he said. Then he fell silent.
I nearly laughed. “Talk about a cliffhanger,” I almost said. Instead—“What happened?” I learned Elijah had been crossing the bridge when the calamity struck. The old timbers had been replaced with steel. His buggy’s iron wheels rattled so loudly they spooked his horse. It jumped the guardrail. Concerned, I asked, “Was the animal hurt?”
He was quiet, and I wondered if he heard me. Then, he muttered, “Horse lived.”
I wanted more, but Elijah only stared, as though he were seeing something still happening behind his eyes.
We reached our destination, an Amish cemetery beside a rolling creek. The markers were modest, just names and dates. Wood. Not meant to last. Meant to remind.
I watched Elijah’s straight-cut coat and broadfall trousers fade into the gloam.
When he returned, he seemed changed—heavier, as if something had been added to a strain he’d been carrying. He set his straw hat on his lap—my cue to take him home.
Having grown used to stillness, I was startled when he spoke again.
“Traveling together, we were,” he said. “Me and Benjamin.”
He said his son’s name with quiet reverence. Benjamin was one of Elijah’s twelve children. I marveled at how love could stretch so far.
Then, “He had da reins dat night.”
I tightened my grip on the wheel.
Elijah pressed his hands together, as if bracing against an unseen gust. His final words hung like woodsmoke in damp air.
“Driver died.”
We rode the rest of the way without speaking. Elijah kept his gaze turned toward the fields, though night had already settled in. At his home, a lantern flickered in a downstairs window, its flame turned low.
He nodded once as he stepped out at his lane, and I drove on into the darkness, the silence riding with me.
Gregory Meece holds degrees in English, communications, and education. His short fiction appears in more than thirty magazines and several anthologies, including Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, New Flash Fiction Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Cleaver, and Scaffold. He lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania, where he works with his Amish neighbors, carves wood, and writes stories. Visit him at MeeceTales.com.
THE WOODSIDE REVIEW
welcomes submissions of finely-crafted poetry and short fiction. Read our guidelines and submit your best work to:
woodsidewrites@protonmail.com
Thanks for reading THE WOODSIDE REVIEW! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.
Love this