Stranded Motorist

 

I walked into the living room.  Mrs. Billingsley was in a swivet about a stranded motorist.  "Where is the stranded motorist?"  She pointed with both hands outside on the lawn.  ??  "How can you see any stranded motorist over there?"  She rambled on for a while.  It was already night, so it was hard to see anything.  Also, the road has been impassable due to snow and ice.  No one has come this way in a few days.  She asked me to call the police and ask them to come over here and help rescue this person.  Mrs. Billingsley's story became wilder and wilder.  She had been driving down the road and saw this car pulled over on the side of the road.  She said she stopped and said, "Hi!"  Then they wanted a ride.  Sure.  She drove them somewhere on "the new highway."  It was twenty miles away.  She just got back.  "That was a strange drive," she said.  "I never saw another car on the road, or a service station, or anything else."  She doesn't drive, so this was all an invention of eating too many carbs at dinner.  She was scaring me in a spooky way.  I assured her that the police had been called and had gone to rescue the stranded motorist, so everything was OK.  Then I asked her if she was ready to go to sleep.  Yes.  So, she's all tucked in dreaming of rides down the new highway.